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Bug#109611: X11-apps only display squares instead of characters



on Wed, Aug 22, 2001 at 12:32:42PM +0200, Dirk Allard (allard@mail.Uni-Mainz.de) wrote:
> Package: general
> Version: N/A; reported 2001-08-22
> Severity: important
> Tags: sid
> 
> 
> 
> -- System Information
> Debian Release: testing/unstable
> Architecture: i386
> Kernel: Linux natta 2.2.18pre21 #1 Sat Nov 18 18:47:15 EST 2000 i686
> Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C
> 
> Some days ago I upgraded from unstable to the latest version of unstable.
> Since then only kde apps (and opera) display the correct characters. All
> other x11 apps only display squares instead of characters. I controlled 
> the font paths in XF86Config-4, they seem to be ok. 

This is probably a locale-related problem.  It seemed to effect a number
of Gtk apps on my 'unstable' box, though other applications may be
effected.  There's background on this going back several years in
XFree86 discussions.  I've posted on the topic to deb-user, thought I'd
posted to d-x.

The problem I'd noted was that iso8859 fonts were being ranked *after*
iso10646 fonts, and applications which can't handle other-than 8-bit
fonts.  

Following turned up in a search:

    http://www.xfree86.org/pipermail/fonts/2000-August/000023.html
                                                                  
    [Fonts] Re: Problem with -Adobe-Helvetica-*-ISO10646-1 and GTK+
    Markus Kuhn Markus.Kuhn@cl.cam.ac.uk                           
    Sun, 13 Aug 2000 10:30:46 +0100     
                                   
    When we add the ISO10646-1 Adobe fonts to XFree86, I fear that we
    will have to find a hack like this around this problem, because  
    unfortunately, far too many X11 applications assume naively that a
    wildcard encoding *-helvetica-*-*-* will give you an 8-bit font. Not
    only GTK+ does this. One solution might be to have separate         
    directories 75dpi-recoded/ and 75dpi/ in that order in the font
    path, which hopefully will give the recoded ISO 8859 fonts a higher
    priority in a *-* encoding selection than the ISO 10646 master     
    fonts. The underlying problem is that strcmp("ISO10646", "ISO8859")
    < 0, so Latin-1 is not the default any more for wildcard encodings.

In one case, I recoded an application to explicitly specify iso8859-1
fonts.  This is a hack and not a general solution.

-- 
Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com>          http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
 What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?             There is no K5 cabal
  http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/               http://www.kuro5hin.org
   Free Dmitry! Boycott Adobe! Repeal the DMCA!    http://www.freesklyarov.org
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