[maemo-developers] border in osso-xterm in fullscreen?

[From: Frantisek Dufka]

Andrew Zabolotny wrote:
> From Wed, 06 Aug 2008 14:31:08 +0200
> Frantisek Dufka <dufkaf at seznam.cz> wrote:
> 
>> I'm wondering why fixed font with height of 16 won't give me full 30 
>> lines in osso-xterm but 29 lines plus one empty line on the bottom. 
>> Anyone knows answer to this mystery?
> Of course that's because the height of the client window area is not
> divisible by the fonw height.

Unlikely. Well, it can be bug in fonts or freetype/gtk/pango (whoever 
decides font height from the font file) but most probably it is just 
because the font is not rendered from the top so there is 1 or 2 lines 
missing on the bottom. I tried two 16px/12pt height fonts both having 
the same problem

Fixedsys Excelsior http://www.fixedsysexcelsior.com/
Terminus http://fractal.csie.org/~eric/wiki/Terminus_font 
http://chlamydia.fs.ei.tum.de/~corecode/unsorted/Terminus.ttf

BTW, later I tried this also in Gnome terminal in Ubuntu 8.04 and I see 
exactly the same problem when in fullscreen mode (F11, right click -> 
turn off menu bar). Screen height 800 is divisible by 16 but I see same 
empty line on the bottom and same hairline white border around Midnight 
Commander's blue panel and see only 49 lines instead of 50.

This also means it is not Maemo specific so it does not belong here.

> 
> You may want to try DejaVu Sans Mono, the pre-packaged DejaVu fonts can
> be downloaded here:
> 
> http://cs.ozerki.net/zap/maemo/dists/diablo/main/binary-armel/ttf-dejavu_2.25-1_all.deb
> 
> In my opinion, DejaVu Sans Mono gives a much nicer appearance to the
> terminal.

Tried it just to verify the bug and now I have another mystery :-) I am 
no expert on font sizes and units but from the information on the net it 
looks like there are two main units - pixels and points. Point is 1/72 
inches so 1 pixel = 1 point at 72 dpi. At 96dpi (our tablet or any MS 
Windows OS in normal configuration) 1 point is 1.33 (or 4/3) pixels so 
12 points = 16 pixels. On tablet this should produce 480/16=30 lines. 
The mystery is that Dejavu font at 12 points gives me only 25 lines + 
some tiny space like 2 pixels. And same happens for Courier New copied 
from Windows. This would mean pixel height for those fonts is slightly 
more than 480/25=19.2, why?.

As for Dejavu/Vera fonts and other scalable fonts in general - they are 
great but IMO at small sizes nothing can beat bitmap fonts.

Frantisek