Re: X-Fonts

[Heather <star@betelgeuse.starshine.org>]

> On Tuesday 09 October 2001 10:08, Curt Howland wrote:
> > I noticed this problem yesterday with Craft. So I just installed xfs and
> > xfs-ttf, and it still doesn't work. Sam simptom, blank dialog boxes,
> > like there just isn't any text.

Such squares usually means a symbol font got picked where a normal one belongs.  
Instead of just startx run,
	startx 2> x-errors

now, when you bail because you can hardly see squat, read it and see if it
is throwing out any font directories which would make life easier.  Perhaps
they are misspelled, perhaps a recent disk crash ate the fixed class fonts
in misc, or something like that.   

See if a fonts.dir file in one of your legal font directories has gotten
mangled.

btw, you can probably moved the "fixed" name to some other font by creating
a fonts.alias entry for one of your legal fonts if you really want to, and 
then regenerating the fonts.dir file from that and the local data.

Caveats:  
1. use a monospace font replacement or you will be very sorry.  
   lucidatypewriter perhaps.
2. anything that's dumb enough to assume the metrics rather than ask for 
   them will become blatantly obvious because it won't line up right,
   may overflow boxes, etc.  Luckily in the land of X this isn't as common
   as MSwin.
3. Isn't defoma supposed to help with these things?  So, I dunno if tweaking
   things by hand will give defoma a headache.  Alternatively, perhaps defoma
   already *is* the headache, or can be used to solve it.

> Offtopic:
> I dont think you need xfs-ttf, it's obsolete with all newer versions of xfs + 
> freetype.

There were 3 major truetype font means last time I was paying close attention.
If xfs-ttf is NOT the freetype based one, then its different renderer might
get a better look or something which he likes - parallel, not obsolete, and
possibly more pain to set up.  Anyways if the one to which you are referring
does use freetype, it's not "obsolete" until its library calls no longer work
on the current freetype revision.  

But adding cooler fonts won't solve his basic font problem, it will just make
it possible for non-basic things to get a decent font later.

Perhaps 	
	apt-get --reinstall install xfonts-base xfonts-100dpi xfonts-jmk

would actually help.  (-jmk isn't a foreign font, it's two more nice quality
fixed style fonts.)

* Heather Stern * star@ many places...