material icons: net_wired renders unexpected symbol (update request)

[mervn]

This has already been acknowledged in commit 85ef8d6. I would like to begin discussions on a fix.

For those using Material-Icons, certain codepoints do not render correctly (i.e net_wired > cable > efe6) and a vast number of recent codepoints are missing (i.e bento > f1f4) . This is partially due to the Material-Icons patch being 8 years old.

I would like to discuss an upgrade path; if it would help, and what it would look like.

• Why is a patched ttf required?
  The discussion in Add new icon set: Material Design Icons #57 introduces reasoning, but does not include "how to patch" nor "why use a patch".

• What does it take to patch it?
  The "how to patch". Is the ttf edited directly? What variables are changed, and how? What tools were used?

• Can this be maintained in this repo (i.e license conflicts)?
  It would be immensely useful for this to be maintained upstream (here). However, Material-Icons is licensed under Apache-2.0, while this repo is GPL-3.0 . Is this irreconcilable?

It should be noted that an upgrade may not fix the net_wired rendering issue, but is a really strong point to start from.

[ammgws]

On phone at the moment but didn't #57 mention it's for fixing the alignment of the icons when used in the bar? Try yourself with custom icon config with a non patched don't and see what it looks like. It's possible that the situation has changed in the years since

[bim9262]

The icon positions look alright to me. All of the ones that had the notes saying the icons were broken work on my system (just installed ttf-material-icons-git).
I verified that those codepoints are still all correct. I did catch that one of the brightness icons was wrong, I'll write a script to verify all of the codepoints match the comment though just to double check everything else.

[mervn]

I tested with ttf-material-icons-git. All broken codepoints are now fixed, as @bim9262 has said. The icons without text seem to be fine, but with text the icons are rendered higher on the Y-axis than the text; which may cause UI issues.

# without text example
format = { $icon |}

# with text example
format = { $icon $volume |}

The Y-axis issue is what the patched Material-Icons was meant to fix. However, even with the patched version, blocks without text are still rendered higher than blocks with text.

It seems to me a patched ttf was used because it is the simplest way to distribute the fix to any environment (i.e with or without fontconfig). It also seems, after glancing at fonts-conf(5), that fontconfig does not give users a way to drop the Y-axis of a glyph.

The core of the issue is that blocks may mix-and-match glyphs that do not necessarily align on the Y-axis. One solution is to patch the ttf, but I think this misses the broader issue. At the same time, I am not sure what the best solution for this would be. It cannot be assumed that the user wants every glyph to align on the Y-axis. However, if the user does want this, there is no sane way to ensure this - we cannot patch every ttf.

Maybe a solution could be a global-config which aligns glyphs on the Y-axis as much as possible? I think this may be out-of-scope for a status-bar though - and probably belongs in fontconfig. Any ideas?