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points by jcgl 4 days ago | 0 comments

I don't think it's accurate to characterize this as Kitty "taking rendering shortcuts." Is this what you're referring to?

> Similarly, some monospaced font families are buggy and have bold or italic faces that have characters wider than the width of the normal face, these will also result in clipping. Such issues should be reported to the font developer. Monospaced font families must have all their characters rendered within a fixed width across all faces of the font, otherwise they aren't really monospaced.

[–] ArchD 4 days ago

I'm not familiar with the legal technicalities around Unicode and fonts to say whether it is the fonts' fault or kitty's fault, but as a user, I see bad rendering (some icon glyphs rendered too small) in kitty but not in ghostty for icon fonts that I don't think are all that obscure.

[–] jcgl 3 days ago

I mean, ultimately more or less agree with you, in that software should work well for the user and do what the user wants. This is a case of this not happening. So, all things being equal, it's bad.

But things aren't all equal--there are tradeoffs at play. Kitty's choice to treat monospace fonts as actually monospaced may not fit everyone, but it's a valid decision in this design space.