Underscores disappearing in IDEA IDEs (Hack-v2_013-ttf)

[treybrisbane]

I've noticed that within IDEA IDEs (I've noticed this on both IntelliJ and PyCharm so far), underscores seem to be disappearing in what appears to be an issue related to how IDEA handles redraw regions for the caret's current line.

Note in the following screenshot how the caret's current line is highlighted, and the underscores are visible:

Hack is designed such that underscores appear on the top-most pixels of the next line down. When the caret is moved down to the next line, the line highlighting follows it, and the underscores disappear:

What I suspect is happening is that IDEA is redrawing the current line after the caret moves down, (firstly the background to remove the line highlighting, then the text), but is NOT redrawing the line above. The result is that due to the underscores of the above line being within the redraw region of the current (highlighted) line, they get removed when the current line's background is redrawn to remove its highlighting.

[Huddo121]

I suspect you're correct. Below is a zoomed in view of the images posted, with the top layer set to 'difference'. As you can see the bottom of the 'p' characters are also being removed.

[chrissimpkins]

This appears to be related to the issue in #45 (and I think that there is at least one other issue report of a similar problem). Can you also verify whether this is a text size dependent phenomenon? With the lowercase g strokes in #45, it only occurs at certain text sizes.

My thought is that this has something to do with the way that these editors are interpreting the vertical metrics of the fonts for the redraws (as you noted above).

[treybrisbane]

Increasing the text size seems to yield no improvements, however, surprisingly, decreasing the text size to 10pt saw underscores rendered on the correct line, thus solving the issue.

Perhaps an issue may need to be filed with the JetBrains team?

[chrissimpkins]

@Tbrisbane strange. OK, looking into it.

[chrissimpkins]

The position of the underscore is too low in the source and it is off center. I will correct these and plan for this change to be in the next release.

As an aside, others have had issues with the width with some renderers. Does it appear too thin on your system?

[manuel-uberti]

They disappear in Emacs mode line too.

The actual folder is "dotted_line".

[treybrisbane]

@chrissimpkins The width looks fine to me. :)

With regards to your planned fix for underscores - note that lower-case 'p' characters also lose their bottom-most pixels as mentioned by @Huddo121. I suspect the same will be true of any character with a low tail (lower-case 'y' would also be a good example), so if this isn't in fact a problem with IDEA's font handling, you may be looking at a 1px upwards bump for all glyphs in order to maintain consistency.

[chrissimpkins]

I have been tinkering with the vertical metrics and am looking at metrics in other fonts. I suspect that this will lead to a fix but it is likely going to require iterations through these various editors and the patterns that you are using to make sure that we have it right.

@manuel-uberti I definitely agree. That is a problem.

Hope to have the first new build out this weekend so that we can see if it helps.

[treybrisbane]

Excellent. Happy to work with you to resolve this! :)

[chrissimpkins]

New test build v2.014 (ttf only) is now available and I hope that it addresses the issues that you reported here. The underscore centering, size, and vertical alignment were updated. The vertical metrics of the fonts were updated.

The files are available in #111. Please let me know how they work and what your thoughts are on the new, tighter vertical metrics as well as the new underscore characters.

[manuel-uberti]

@chrissimpkins thanks, I'll try it asap.

[chrissimpkins]

From the #111, comment by @Tbrisbane re: changes in the v2.014 ttf file build

PyCharm still has issues with some characters' tails disappearing ('p', 'y', 'g', 'j', etc), however, strangely, these issues are NOT present in IntelliJ

I scanned the above posts and don't see that we addressed your platform and the version of the PyCharm and IntelliJ editors. Mind posting this information and letting me know if they are current builds vs. development/prelease builds? Any chance that this is a font caching issue and a reboot takes care of it in PyCharm?

[manuel-uberti]

Looks good on Emacs now:

[chrissimpkins]

@manuel-uberti 👍 great!