Line height too tall?

[quincylvania]

We're using the Americana font stack over at OpenTrailMap and have run into some issues with the default line height. It seems that it may be too tall, as text is not centered on lines by default. This results in unequal padding when offsetting text from a line, depending on whether it's rendered above or below the line. This behavior is the same in both Firefox and Safari.

[1ec5]

I wonder if this is a consequence of including Thai and Vietnamese in the same fontstack. Pan-Unicode fonts tend to have tall line heights for this reason (especially if the font format lacks a mechanism for ascender height above cap height).

[ZeLonewolf]

I've been debugging this, and I suspect the problem is actually with the space character being too tall.

[1ec5]

In 1ec5/maplibre-gl-js#1, I was finding that GL JS hard-codes a line height from Arial Unicode MS regardless of the font and ended up removing these fudge factors when implementing all-local text rendering: 1ec5/maplibre-gl-js@b6df63e. Arial Unicode MS is the default font when text-font is unspecified, but it’s notorious for its excessive line height (to accommodate Thai and Vietnamese somewhat naïvely).

[ZeLonewolf]

We are pulling the space character from GothicA1-regular. When I move that character to NotoSans700, I'm seeing some bad behavior go away.

Example from another project of proper spacing: