Fonts

Font display problems

In an UTF-8 locale, Ion displays some characters incorrectly.

The particular effect you're referring to, is likely not an Ion bug. Ion doesn't display the characters, and does very little mangling too.¹ The effect is more likely an X(lib) bug. For some reason, with some fonts, X(lib) decides to substitute certain characters with multiple characters, that do not even appear to depict the original (e.g. two parentheses are seen often). So, file the bug to X.org, and make them fix their broken code. (They might not bother: the trend seems to be to force everyone to use Xft shite and blurred fonts.)

Font loading

Ion can't find any fonts

This is not an Ion problem. The two most likely culprits are a) gnome-settings-daemon or some other gnome component messing up Xorg, or b) totally broken Ubuntu Edgy Xorg configuration files.

Blurred fonts

Does Ion support anti-aliased fonts/Xft?

No. Antialiasing is an ugly self-defeating kludge, as is subpixel placement. The only way screens can convey subpixel resolution information in a manner that doesn't make the characters look like having been smeared with mud, is for the screen resolution to be so huge that you can not pinpoint individual pixels without a magnifier. Present technology is not even close to that kind of resolutions, which would defeat the purpose of these kludges. And yet fascist core software – an industry-wide trend – such as Xft/fontconfig are shipped for such end-of-the-rainbow technology, without regard for the present – without regard for differing tastes, oppressing users who do not like their fonts blurred.

I will not consider supporting Xft/fontconfig and blurred fonts in Ion until clear, crisp unblurred fonts and bitmap fonts can easily be enabled on all significant distributions from the command line (without root access, without touching XML with even a kilometre long stick, and without manually compiling a version that includes the bytecode interpreter, the autohinter being a ridiculous joke). Most likely this will never happen, given the woeful state of FOSS.

I will also not provide support for versions of Ion that have been corrupted with support for such things as Xft/fontconfig, and such versions may not be distributed as “Ion”.