GNU bug report logs - #56823
29.0.50; Inconsistent button size in NEWS

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Message #5 received at submit <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Po Lu <luangruo <at> yahoo.com>
To: bug-gnu-emacs <at> gnu.org
Subject: 29.0.50; Inconsistent button size in NEWS
Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2022 20:59:57 +0800

Type C-h n RET to view NEWS, and then click on one of the buttons.
The big right arrow icon will be replaced by a smaller down arrow.

Both arrows are being displayed with the Symbola font.  It seems wrong
and unprofessional to place the size of our buttons at the mercy of the
user's symbol font.  I suggest making the default the XPM arrows used in
Custom instead.

In GNU Emacs 29.0.50 (build 88, x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)
 of 2022-07-29 built on trinity
Repository revision: 02b180e955ab0923b5fe2b8f362f1fedb092f760
Repository branch: master
Windowing system distributor 'The X.Org Foundation', version 11.0.12014000
System Description: Fedora Linux 36 (Workstation Edition)

Configured using:
 'configure --with-x --with-x-toolkit=no --with-dumping=unexec
 --cache-file=/tmp/ccache --without-cairo'

Configured features:
ACL DBUS FREETYPE GIF GLIB GMP GNUTLS GSETTINGS HARFBUZZ JPEG JSON LCMS2
LIBSELINUX LIBSYSTEMD LIBXML2 MODULES NOTIFY INOTIFY OLDXMENU PNG RSVG
SECCOMP SOUND SQLITE3 THREADS TIFF UNEXEC WEBP X11 XDBE XFT XIM XINPUT2
XPM ZLIB

Important settings:
  value of $LANG: en_GB.UTF-8
  value of $XMODIFIERS: @im=none
  locale-coding-system: utf-8-unix

Major mode: NEWS

Minor modes in effect:
  outline-minor-mode: t
  tooltip-mode: t
  global-eldoc-mode: t
  show-paren-mode: t
  electric-indent-mode: t
  mouse-wheel-mode: t
  tool-bar-mode: t
  menu-bar-mode: t
  file-name-shadow-mode: t
  global-font-lock-mode: t
  font-lock-mode: t
  blink-cursor-mode: t
  buffer-read-only: t
  line-number-mode: t
  indent-tabs-mode: t
  transient-mark-mode: t
  auto-composition-mode: t
  auto-encryption-mode: t
  auto-compression-mode: t
  button-mode: t

Load-path shadows:
None found.

Features:
(shadow sort mail-extr emacsbug message mailcap yank-media puny dired
dired-loaddefs rfc822 mml mml-sec password-cache epa derived epg rfc6068
epg-config gnus-util text-property-search time-date subr-x mm-decode
mm-bodies mm-encode mail-parse rfc2231 mailabbrev gmm-utils mailheader
sendmail rfc2047 rfc2045 ietf-drums mm-util mail-prsvr mail-utils vc-git
diff-mode vc-dispatcher pcase emacs-news-mode noutline outline
easy-mmode icons cl-loaddefs cl-lib rmc iso-transl tooltip eldoc paren
electric uniquify ediff-hook vc-hooks lisp-float-type elisp-mode mwheel
term/x-win x-win term/common-win x-dnd tool-bar dnd fontset image
regexp-opt fringe tabulated-list replace newcomment text-mode lisp-mode
prog-mode register page tab-bar menu-bar rfn-eshadow isearch easymenu
timer select scroll-bar mouse jit-lock font-lock syntax font-core
term/tty-colors frame minibuffer nadvice seq simple cl-generic
indonesian philippine cham georgian utf-8-lang misc-lang vietnamese
tibetan thai tai-viet lao korean japanese eucjp-ms cp51932 hebrew greek
romanian slovak czech european ethiopic indian cyrillic chinese
composite emoji-zwj charscript charprop case-table epa-hook
jka-cmpr-hook help abbrev obarray oclosure cl-preloaded button loaddefs
faces cus-face macroexp files window text-properties overlay sha1 md5
base64 format env code-pages mule custom widget keymap
hashtable-print-readable backquote threads dbusbind inotify lcms2
dynamic-setting system-font-setting font-render-setting xinput2 x
multi-tty make-network-process emacs)

Memory information:
((conses 16 133002 9879)
 (symbols 48 21529 0)
 (strings 32 32182 2042)
 (string-bytes 1 843394)
 (vectors 16 18989)
 (vector-slots 8 571018 14987)
 (floats 8 63 103)
 (intervals 56 1476 785)
 (buffers 992 12))

Message #8 received at 56823 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org>
To: Po Lu <luangruo <at> yahoo.com>
Cc: 56823 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: Re: bug#56823: 29.0.50; Inconsistent button size in NEWS
Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2022 16:37:43 +0300

> Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2022 20:59:57 +0800
> From:  Po Lu via "Bug reports for GNU Emacs,
>  the Swiss army knife of text editors" <bug-gnu-emacs <at> gnu.org>
> 
> 
> Type C-h n RET to view NEWS, and then click on one of the buttons.

When I do "C-h n" in the current master, I see no buttons at all.  Do
I need to do anything else to see the issue you are describing?

Message #11 received at 56823 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Po Lu <luangruo <at> yahoo.com>
To: Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org>
Cc: 56823 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: Re: bug#56823: 29.0.50; Inconsistent button size in NEWS
Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2022 21:54:23 +0800

Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org> writes:

>> Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2022 20:59:57 +0800
>> From:  Po Lu via "Bug reports for GNU Emacs,
>>  the Swiss army knife of text editors" <bug-gnu-emacs <at> gnu.org>
>> 
>> 
>> Type C-h n RET to view NEWS, and then click on one of the buttons.
>
> When I do "C-h n" in the current master, I see no buttons at all.  Do
> I need to do anything else to see the issue you are describing?

Sorry, Lars seems to have just changed the behavior.  Try the buttons in
"C-h b" instead.

Message #14 received at 56823 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org>
To: Po Lu <luangruo <at> yahoo.com>
Cc: 56823 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: Re: bug#56823: 29.0.50; Inconsistent button size in NEWS
Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2022 17:01:45 +0300

> From: Po Lu <luangruo <at> yahoo.com>
> Cc: 56823 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
> Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2022 21:54:23 +0800
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org> writes:
> 
> >> Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2022 20:59:57 +0800
> >> From:  Po Lu via "Bug reports for GNU Emacs,
> >>  the Swiss army knife of text editors" <bug-gnu-emacs <at> gnu.org>
> >> 
> >> 
> >> Type C-h n RET to view NEWS, and then click on one of the buttons.
> >
> > When I do "C-h n" in the current master, I see no buttons at all.  Do
> > I need to do anything else to see the issue you are describing?
> 
> Sorry, Lars seems to have just changed the behavior.  Try the buttons in
> "C-h b" instead.

OK.  So we should perhaps use :align-to display property to align the
text that follows the symbol.

Message #17 received at 56823 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Po Lu <luangruo <at> yahoo.com>
To: Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org>
Cc: 56823 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: Re: bug#56823: 29.0.50; Inconsistent button size in NEWS
Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2022 08:57:02 +0800

Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org> writes:

> OK.  So we should perhaps use :align-to display property to align the
> text that follows the symbol.

That still makes the individual buttons look wrong, since the first is
solid (in Symbola) while the second is hollow.

So I really think using an image by default is the better solution.

Message #20 received at 56823 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi <at> gnus.org>
To: Po Lu <luangruo <at> yahoo.com>
Cc: 56823 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: Re: bug#56823: 29.0.50; Inconsistent button size in NEWS
Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2022 14:58:42 +0200

Po Lu <luangruo <at> yahoo.com> writes:

> Type C-h n RET to view NEWS, and then click on one of the buttons.
> The big right arrow icon will be replaced by a smaller down arrow.

Do you have a screenshot of the situation?

> Both arrows are being displayed with the Symbola font.

It sounds like our font selection code is wonky if it displays two
glyphs from the same font with different sizes.  What does `M-x
describe-char' on the two glyphs say?

Message #23 received at 56823 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi <at> gnus.org>
To: Po Lu <luangruo <at> yahoo.com>
Cc: 56823 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: Re: bug#56823: 29.0.50; Inconsistent button size in NEWS
Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2022 15:15:08 +0200

In any case, I think I'm going to rework how the buttons are selected
slightly.  It should really check all the buttons in the same :group
whether they can be displayed, so that we don't end up with a symbol for
one button and text for a different button.  I.e., degrade for the
entire :group at once.

At the same time, I'm wondering whether it'd make sense to examine
whether we get the same font for all the items in the same :group,
because mixing fonts for this sort of this is seldom pretty.

It will have performance impacts, so perhaps some caching of the results
is also in order...

I'll get tinkering (but probably not this weekend).

Message #26 received at 56823 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi <at> gnus.org>
To: Po Lu <luangruo <at> yahoo.com>
Cc: 56823 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: Re: bug#56823: 29.0.50; Inconsistent button size in NEWS
Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2022 15:37:10 +0200

But I see that the `symbol' entries in the buttons in outline-mode were
from different sections of the Unicode standard, so I've now chosen two
that are more related, which should help.

Message #29 received at 56823 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Po Lu <luangruo <at> yahoo.com>
To: Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi <at> gnus.org>
Cc: 56823 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: Re: bug#56823: 29.0.50; Inconsistent button size in NEWS
Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2022 21:40:28 +0800

[Message part 1 (text/plain, inline)]

Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi <at> gnus.org> writes:

> Do you have a screenshot of the situation?

Sure.  Here's a screenshot of both kinds of buttons inside "C-h b".

[Screenshot from 2022-07-30 21-38-10.png (image/png, attachment)]

[Message part 3 (text/plain, inline)]

They are being displayed with the same font, which just has differently
sized glyphs inside -- there is no problem with the font selection code.

Message #32 received at 56823 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi <at> gnus.org>
To: Po Lu <luangruo <at> yahoo.com>
Cc: 56823 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: Re: bug#56823: 29.0.50; Inconsistent button size in NEWS
Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2022 15:54:13 +0200

Po Lu <luangruo <at> yahoo.com> writes:

> Sure.  Here's a screenshot of both kinds of buttons inside "C-h b".

Oh, the problem you're seeing isn't that the `symbol' items are
displayed with different sizes -- it's the faulty emoji detection (which
we're discussing how to fix over in the other bug report).

Message #35 received at 56823 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Po Lu <luangruo <at> yahoo.com>
To: Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi <at> gnus.org>
Cc: 56823 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: Re: bug#56823: 29.0.50; Inconsistent button size in NEWS
Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2022 22:06:22 +0800

Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi <at> gnus.org> writes:

> Po Lu <luangruo <at> yahoo.com> writes:
>
>> Sure.  Here's a screenshot of both kinds of buttons inside "C-h b".
>
> Oh, the problem you're seeing isn't that the `symbol' items are
> displayed with different sizes -- it's the faulty emoji detection

The Xft build doesn't support color Emoji (but I don't like them in the
first place, so I've deleted the color Emoji fonts from my system), so
they are being displayed by the same Symbola font.

Message #38 received at 56823 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi <at> gnus.org>
To: Po Lu <luangruo <at> yahoo.com>
Cc: 56823 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: Re: bug#56823: 29.0.50; Inconsistent button size in NEWS
Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2022 16:09:25 +0200

Po Lu <luangruo <at> yahoo.com> writes:

> The Xft build doesn't support color Emoji (but I don't like them in the
> first place, so I've deleted the color Emoji fonts from my system), so
> they are being displayed by the same Symbola font.

Yes.  See bug#56691.

Message #41 received at 56823 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Po Lu <luangruo <at> yahoo.com>
To: Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi <at> gnus.org>
Cc: 56823 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: Re: bug#56823: 29.0.50; Inconsistent button size in NEWS
Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2022 22:20:26 +0800

Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi <at> gnus.org> writes:

> Po Lu <luangruo <at> yahoo.com> writes:
>
>> The Xft build doesn't support color Emoji (but I don't like them in the
>> first place, so I've deleted the color Emoji fonts from my system), so
>> they are being displayed by the same Symbola font.
>
> Yes.  See bug#56691.

Thanks, I tried to say something relevant there.  But IMHO the cause of
this problem is defaulting to the use of Emoji instead of proper images
as a substitute for buttons.

Not only does this cause problems if the user has an unexpected set of
fonts installed, compounded by how font rendering infrastructure has
never been designed for displaying buttons, it makes Emacs look very
unprofessionally made.  I cannot think of a single other GUI program
that uses Emoji to replace buttons.

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