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Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

The concept of changing "line height" seems completely broken for monospace fonts. Changing the line height of a monospace font makes line-drawing characters (lines, boxes, etc) fail to line up, either by overlapping or by having gaps between them.

This gist shows an example of the problem; GitHub's CSS breaks this property of monospace fonts: https://gist.github.com/joshtriplett/dc2446716999c54cc9a5c48...

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I agree, by default I would want to trust the line height of my font designer, just like I trust their letter spacing. I very rarely use multiple fonts on the same line (maybe a monospace font for inline code?).

Many fonts are designed so that you’ll set at least 1.2 line height. 1.0 barely fits the characters themselves

Right. If you're mixing multiple fonts on the same line, the default should be the maximum line height of the fonts, unless overridden.

Those should not be drawn by font. I believe the only way is for the app, e.g. terminal, to intercept and draw them directly, not through the font. Otherwise you’ll get horizontal gaps too https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode/issues/449

That looks like a rendering bug in the application. There's no fundamental reason they should have either horizontal or vertical gaps, if character cells are rendered at the correct size.

font metrics are fractional at most sizes. You can optimize font for one particular size, but for any other, there will be gaps

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