A short while before the release of Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) I did some work on the micro-blogging client Gwibber. I fixed a bug related to the disproportionally large fonts present in the GUI of Gwibber, which had been plaguing the 2.0.0 release for quite a while.
It turns out this fix was a very minor adjustment to a font offset within the code relating to the rendering of micro-blogs. Locating and changing this offset, recompiling and packaging was complete in under half an hour since it was a simple fix.
I uploaded the bug fix to Launchpad Bug #460069 as gwibber-2.0.0~bzr476-0ubuntu2 prior to the release of Ubuntu 9.10, but sadly the change was rolled back by gwibber-2.0.0~bzr476-0ubuntu3. This roll back was justified by the reasoning that this should be fixed upsteam properly, rather than the implemented quick fix of a simple font offeset adjustment.
If you are using Gwibber and experiencing the large font sizes issue, feel free to make use of the following .deb package which fix the issue. This package is also available from the Launchpad bug discussed above.
- gwibber-2.0.0~bzr476-0ubuntu2_all.deb – Gwibber 2.0.0 Debian package, for both 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (x64) architectures, with fix for large font size issue (via change in font offset)
- gwibber-2.0.0~bzr476-0ubuntu2.debdiff – Gwibber 2.0.0 .debdiff patch of change from gwibber_2.0.0~bzr476-0ubuntu1 to gwibber-2.0.0~bzr476-0ubuntu2
Please note that if you make use of this package, it will be considered out of date by your system and your package manager will attempt to update it to gwibber-2.0.0~bzr476-0ubuntu3 which will roll back the changes, so you will be back on the larger fonts. Until an upstream fix is pushed out to Ubuntu 9.10, I recommend retaining gwibber-2.0.0~bzr476-0ubuntu2 and not allowing your package manager to update to the latest version of Gwibber.
If you wish this change to be reapplied officially in the Ubuntu software repositories, please comment here and, more importantly, on the relevant Launchpad Bug #460069. Even though I agree the change should be fixed properly upstream at some point, I believe this package works well as a temporary fix of the aesthetic font issue, until the upstream fix is complete and distributed.
As always, any comments or questions about the subject of this article, Gwibber, micro-blogging or Ubuntu in general are always welcome.
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