awesome icons broken after ttf-font-awesome update on Arch

[eguiraud]

As per the pacman logs below, ttf-font-awesome was updated by pacman on the 29th of December,
which resulted in i3status-rust looking like this:

As you can see icons do not display properly anymore. removing i3status-rust-git and re-installing from AUR did not fix the issue.

Relevant snippet of pacman logs:

[2017-12-29 17:12] [PACMAN] Running 'pacman -Syu'                                                                       
[2017-12-29 17:12] [PACMAN] synchronizing package lists                                                                 
[2017-12-29 17:13] [PACMAN] starting full system upgrade                                                                
[2017-12-29 17:22] [ALPM] transaction started                                                                           
[2017-12-29 17:22] [ALPM] upgraded docker (1:17.11.0-1 -> 1:17.12.0-1)                                                  
[2017-12-29 17:22] [ALPM] upgraded mesa (17.3.0-2 -> 17.3.1-2)                                                          
[2017-12-29 17:22] [ALPM] upgraded firefox (57.0.2-1 -> 57.0.3-1)                                                       
[2017-12-29 17:22] [ALPM] upgraded lib32-mesa (17.3.0-2 -> 17.3.1-2)                                                    
[2017-12-29 17:22] [ALPM] upgraded numactl (2.0.11-1 -> 2.0.11-2)                                                       
[2017-12-29 17:22] [ALPM] upgraded ttf-font-awesome (4.7.0-5 -> 5.0.2-1)                                                
[2017-12-29 17:22] [ALPM] upgraded xorg-server-common (1.19.5-1 -> 1.19.6-2)                                            
[2017-12-29 17:22] [ALPM] upgraded xorg-server (1.19.5-1 -> 1.19.6-2)                                                   
[2017-12-29 17:22] [ALPM] transaction completed                                                                         
[2017-12-29 17:22] [ALPM] running 'fontconfig.hook'...                                                                  
[2017-12-29 17:22] [ALPM] running 'gtk-update-icon-cache.hook'...                                                       
[2017-12-29 17:22] [ALPM] running 'systemd-sysusers.hook'...                                                            
[2017-12-29 17:22] [ALPM] running 'systemd-update.hook'...                                                              
[2017-12-29 17:22] [ALPM] running 'update-desktop-database.hook'...                                                     
[2017-12-29 17:22] [ALPM] running 'xorg-mkfontdir.hook'... 

[atheriel]

This is due to the fact that version 4 and 5 of ttf-font-awesome are incompatible (see e.g. this issue for problems related to polybar). Try modifying your i3 config's font settings. If that doesn't work, my recommendation for now is to downgrade or use ttf-font-awesome-4 from the AUR. That's what I'm doing at the moment, and it works just fine.

[eguiraud]

Thank you for the quick response! If I understand correctly:

• there is no plan to migrate i3status-rust to the new version of ttf-font-awesome
• I should configure the bar to use ttf-font-awesome-4 from the AUR instead

I am unsure what you mean with "try modifying your i3 config's font settings. Currently it's
font pango:DejaVu Sans Mono, Awesome 15
but I don't know how to switch it to version 4 -- any idea? 😅

EDIT:
can confirm that the following one-liner solves the issue, if uninstalling ttf-font-awesome is an option:
sudo pacman -Rns ttf-font-awesome && pacaur -S ttf-font-awesome-4

[atheriel]

Since this is a font issue, it should be possible to modify your i3 config's settings to use the new font, e.g.

# with ttf-font-awesome-4:
font pango:DejaVu Sans Mono, FontAwesome 15
# with ttf-font-awesome:
font pango:DejaVu Sans Mono, FontAwesome5Free, FontAwesome5Brands 15

(You can see in the output of fc-list | grep Awesome that the name of the font has changed in version 5.) However, this doesn't actually work for me. I still get the same missing character artifacts.

This might be related to the fact that this Font Awesome does not have a blank space glyph, which was an issue for the Siji font at some point, although I'm really just guessing now.

I'll continue to recommend downgrading. There is some relevant discussion on Reddit as well.

I'm not sure this is actually a problem with i3status-rust, since we can't modify any of our code to fix external font problems, but I'll leave the issue open for now. I'll very welcome to suggestions.

[eguiraud]

I'm not sure this is actually a problem with i3status-rust, since we can't modify any of our code to fix external font problems, but I'll leave the issue open for now. I'll very welcome to suggestions.

That is fair, but at least the dependency should be changed to ttf-font-awesome-4 -- probably inform the AUR package maintainer if there is one.

[atheriel]

There's now some mention of this in the project README. I have no idea who is maintaining the AUR package, but perhaps @greshake will know.

[mmetak]

Hi, i3status-rust-git maintainer here. I've updated the font name in aur.

@bluehood
Latest font awesome 5 doesn't conflict with previous version 4 so there's no need to remove ttf-awesome.
File names are different and their font names are also different. Not sure why package in AUR has conflicts?

[eguiraud]

@mmetak thank you for the quick reply!
I did not experience any conflicts, the problem is that i3status-rust does not support ttf-font-awesome anymore, only ttf-font-awesome-4

[atheriel]

@mmetak Hijacking this a little, but I'll also point out that i3status-rust runs just fine under sway, so if you can indicate that the sway package satisfies the i3 dependency that would be appreciated as well 😄

[mmetak]

EDIT:
can confirm that the following one-liner solves the issue, if uninstalling ttf-font-awesome is an option:
sudo pacman -Rns ttf-font-awesome && pacaur -S ttf-font-awesome-4

I was reffering to this part that you wrote. ttf-font-awesome-4 package in AUR has conflicts=('ttf-font-awesome') when it doesn't conflict.
They both have different file and font names so you can install them both at the same time, only have to adjust config file with proper names as @atheriel pointed out above.

@atheriel
I just dropped i3-wm from depends and updated description to indicate that you can use it with i3bar or swaybar. That seems like simplest solution?

[eguiraud]

@mmetak I see now, thanks! I went to the ttf-font-awesome-4 aur page to comment and saw that you already did :)

However I am not sure how i3 could decide which of the two icons to use if both packages were installed: the only line I have in my i3/config relative to font-awesome, which works for both version 4 and 5, is font pango:DejaVu Sans Mono, Awesome 15

[mmetak]

@bluehood

$ fc-list | grep Awesome
/usr/share/fonts/TTF/fa-regular-400.ttf: Font Awesome 5 Free:style=Regular
/usr/share/fonts/TTF/fontawesome-webfont.ttf: FontAwesome:style=Regular
/usr/share/fonts/TTF/fa-solid-900.ttf: Font Awesome 5 Free:style=Solid
/usr/share/fonts/TTF/fa-brands-400.ttf: Font Awesome 5 Brands:style=Regular

I use font pango:FontAwesome for version 4 of font awesome and font pango:Font Awesome 5 Free for
when I want version 5.

[eguiraud]

fair enough :) as you can see I am very clumsy with fonts, sorry 😅

[atheriel]

It sounds like we should report this lack of conflict upstream to the ttf-font-awesome-4 package, IMO.

@mmetak That works nicely, thank you.

[eguiraud]

@atheriel it was reported here in the comments.

For what concerns me this issue can be closed: using ttf-font-awesome-4 solves the problem with the icons, and both the README and the AUR package now report ttf-font-awesome-4 as the optional dependency to get fancy icons :)