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[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Now I think about it more, even just ensuring that monospace fonts fall
back to other monospace fonts wouldn't solve the problem, for two
reasons. First, monospace fonts can be different widths, so the fallback
might be wider than the original. And second, the character might not be
present in any monospace fonts at all, but still be present in a
proportional font, and it would be better to fall back to a proportional
font than to nothing at all.

So ideal behavior, perhaps, would be ensuring that a fallback character
for a monospace font is the same width as the original font -- by
centering it if it is narrower, and by scaling it down if it is wider.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/932958

Title:
  Missing characters in monospace fonts fall back to proportional fonts

Status in fontconfig package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  gnome-terminal 3.0.1-0ubuntu3, Ubuntu 11.10
  gnome-terminal 3.6.2-0ubuntu1, Ubuntu 15.04

  When a character is not present in whichever monospace font you are
  using, Ubuntu chooses a proportional font to render it.

  This is usually not desirable. In a terminal, for example, the
  proportional character is often too wide and therefore overlapped by
  the following character.

  For example:
  - bug 819708 (heavy line-drawing characters not lined up in Ubuntu Mono)
  - bug 1116428 ('DOTTED CIRCLE' and 'BLACK CIRCLE' substituted from a wider font)
  - bug 1094434 ("font lacks that symbols and use the ones from the other font which have incorrect sizes")
  - bug 736613 ("the ! is rendered on top of the C")
  - this bug as originally reported (U+25B7 white right-pointing triangle and U+20AF drachma overlapping with following characters).

  This happens with multiple monospace fonts -- Droid Sans Mono,
  Terminus, TlwgMono Medium, and Ubuntu Mono -- suggesting that it is a
  problem with fontconfig, rather than with the individual fonts.

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