Certain musical glyphs (e.g. quarter note 𝅘𝅥 U+1D15F) incur large vertical space

[j39m (Kalvin)]

Text with certain glyphs causes text (e.g. in most visible elements of Quod Libet or in the status line of waybar) to suddenly take on lots of vertical space.

Note the engorged search bar and the individual titles forced “downwards” in-place, going out of view.

This “feels” a bit like a Pango thing, but I don’t have enough experience to say for certain. Could somebody suggest how I could track this down?

[jfrancis (Jason Francis)]

I cannot reproduce, you are using a custom font so it could be an issue with that.

For decorative purposes you may want to try one of these characters instead: ♩ 🎜

[j39m (Kalvin)]

Thanks for checking! For experimentation I tried switching to the Fira family (depicted), though previously I was using Cantarell. It appears that neither of these actually support U+1d15f:

$ fc-list ':charset=1d15f'
/usr/share/fonts/mscore-musejazz-fonts/MuseJazzText.otf: MuseJazz Text:style=Regular
/usr/share/fonts/mscore-gootville-fonts/Gootville.otf: Gootville:style=Regular
/usr/share/fonts/steinberg-bravuratext-fonts/BravuraText.otf: Bravura Text:style=Regular
/usr/share/fonts/steinberg-bravura-fonts/Bravura.otf: Bravura:style=Regular
/usr/share/fonts/mscore-gootville-fonts/GootvilleText.otf: Gootville Text:style=Regular
/usr/share/fonts/gdouros-symbola/Symbola.ttf: Symbola:style=Regular
/usr/share/fonts/gnu-free/FreeSerif.ttf: FreeSerif:style=Regular,нормален,normal,obyčejné,Mittel,µεσαία,Normaali,Normál,Normale,Gemiddeld,odmiana zwykła,Обычный,Normálne,ปกติ,menengah,прямій,Navadno,vidējs,normalusis,عادی,vừa,Arrunta,सामान्य

So I was probably getting by on some unsupported fallback behavior.

[jfrancis (Jason Francis)]

I forget how to change the fallback order but it is possible somehow. I am getting FreeFont as the fallback on my system and the spacing on that seems to be all right.

[j39m (Kalvin)]

I did some cursory digging but decided against that. U&L SE suggests tinkering with the entries in /etc/fonts/conf.d, but I think that’s more than I would like to do.

Wild speculation: U+1D15F (among several other glyphs in the neighborhood) are really only meant for musical typesetting and not for more general usage. U+2669 (the first alternative you suggested) is much better-supported.