Hello Egmont.

Thank you for the detailed reply and for fixing my understanding about
these issues. I also highly appreciate your work and help!

I was using the default font in Ubuntu, but when I changed it to
Monospace 9 (or even 12) as you suggested, the spaces issues disappeared
and the text is now indeed very much more readable. I attached
screenshots for Monospace 9 and 12.

I am not sure however, which Monospace font is that? I mean, to which
family? In the terminal settings it just says "Monospace".

So perhaps the first thing we can drive from this to fix bug 1: Use a
different terminal font by default in Ubuntu for GNOME Terminal instead
of the one currently being used (which currently seems to me to be
Ubuntu Mono 12)? Maybe this could be done at least when the system
language is Arabic?

I will test additional possible fonts and see how they would look like.

For bug 2, I did a small test for "apt" output in the terminal and also
in the web browser (attached images) and in Gedit. You can see that both
the RTL webpage and Gedit can display the same output text very much
better than the terminal, the order of the text is changed, and displays
very nicely. Perhaps the only issue is from apt's translation side (they
seem to have left 1 letter untranslated which is the M letter in "MB",
which is giving the uncomfortable look), but aside from that, Gedit and
the web browser can display the same text without issues, unlike in the
GNOME Terminal which changes the order of the text.

So to sum up, if my understanding is correct, are you saying that VTE
actually supports displaying RTL/BiDi correctly, and this is just an
issue in "applications" like apt, tmux, vim... etc, and they need to fix
this issue from their side? I mean, it is an issue in the apps
themselves, and not terminal emulators (like GNOME Terminal), correct?

Thank you so much for your help, and for your work over the years. I am
trying to make a small volunteering team to report all Arabic/RTL
related bugs in Linux and open source software (we have sadly so many,
like tens of them!), and we are gradually starting to report and
investigate any bug.

I would happily test any scenario or experiment to fix any Arabic or
RTL-related bug.

P.S: It sounds like Launchpad does not allow multiple image uploads (or
I didn't find it), so I had to upload images one by one, sorry for that!

-- 
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop
Packages, which is subscribed to gnome-terminal in Ubuntu.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/2002290

Title:
  Poor Arabic rendering in VTE

Status in gnome-terminal package in Ubuntu:
  New
Status in vte package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  VTE has a number of issues when it comes to rendering Arabic letters
  in the terminal, which could affect a number of languages (Arabic,
  Urdu, Persian... etc).

  Bug 1: Any Arabic word in any VTE-based terminal is choppily displayed
  with spaces between its letters, making readability hard and sometimes
  not possible. Sometimes the letters are crushed together very closely
  making reading impossible too.

  Bug 2: If a non-Arabic text and an Arabic text are displayed together
  in the same line, then the entire line will be missed up and you won't
  be able to understand what is being said.

  Both of these bugs can be seen from the image I attached.

  I reported both of these bugs together because it's unlikely they can
  be fixed separately, probably they are related to each other.

  Problem can be seen in any VTE-based terminal. Here I am using GNOME
  Terminal 3.44.0 on Ubuntu 22.04, but it can be seen in any Ubuntu
  version and in any terminal version as well (it has been there since
  forever).

  I reported the bug here instead of upstream because that's what they
  said at the page: https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Terminal/ReportingBugs,
  but this bug is not related to Ubuntu only; it happens on all Linux
  distributions.

  Happy to provide any information you need, or any do tests or
  experiments.

To manage notifications about this bug go to:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-terminal/+bug/2002290/+subscriptions


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