Firefox font support on Sarge

[Bill Moseley <moseley@hank.org>]

I just did a Sarge install and trying to get fonts up to where they
are on my Sid machines.   After the base install and installing
Firefox I noticed poor font support and often missing symbols.

I started blindly throwing font packages at it:

   msttcorefonts
   x-ttcidfont-conf
   gsfonts-x11

Which seems to fix most things.

Even after adding the above, I've been seeing a number of sites that
use   entity.

    http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/entities/special.html

I have never understood fonts very well, so how do I figure what font
package a given symbol might be found in?  In other words, if
Firefox shows that little box indicating it didn't find a character,
how do I debug?  How do I determine what font Firefox is requesting
and where in the process it's failing?

In other words, I'm more interested in learning how to debug this than
how to fix it.

I assume in the above case of   that it's finding the correct
font, but that it's just that the symbol is not included.





 dpkg -l | grep font
ii  console-data   2002.12.04dbs- Keymaps, fonts, charset maps, fallback table
ii  console-tools  0.2.3dbs-56    Linux console and font utilities
ii  defoma         0.11.8-0.1     Debian Font Manager -- automatic font config
ii  fontconfig     2.3.1-2        generic font configuration library
ii  gsfonts        8.14+v8.11+urw Fonts for the Ghostscript interpreter(s)
ii  gsfonts-x11    0.17           Make Ghostscript fonts available to X11
ii  latex-xft-font 0.1-5          Xft-compatible versions of some LaTeX fonts
ii  libconsole     0.2.3dbs-56    Shared libraries for Linux console and font 
ii  libfontconfig1 2.3.1-2        generic font configuration library (shared l
ii  libfreetype6   2.1.7-2.4      FreeType 2 font engine, shared library files
ii  libt1-5        5.0.2-3        Type 1 font rasterizer library - runtime
ii  libxft1        4.3.0.dfsg.1-1 FreeType-based font drawing library for X (v
ii  libxft2        2.1.7-1        FreeType-based font drawing library for X
ii  msttcorefonts  1.2            Installer for Microsoft TrueType core fonts
ii  x-ttcidfont-co 17             Configure TrueType and CID fonts for X
ii  xfonts-100dpi  4.3.0.dfsg.1-1 100 dpi fonts for X
ii  xfonts-75dpi   4.3.0.dfsg.1-1 75 dpi fonts for X
ii  xfonts-base    4.3.0.dfsg.1-1 standard fonts for X
ii  xfonts-scalabl 4.3.0.dfsg.1-1 scalable fonts for X
ii  xfs            4.3.0.dfsg.1-1 X font server

-- 
Bill Moseley
moseley@hank.org