Bug#335063: xutils: mkfontdir installs faulty fonts.dir for ttf-bitstream-vera pkg.
Package: xutils
Version: 4.3.0.dfsg.1-14sarge1
Severity: important
After installing the ttf-bitstream-vera font package,
I find that X gives a "could not init fontpath element"
error message for the TrueType fonts. This appears to be
caused by faulty fonts.dir and fonts.scale files created in
/var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d/dirs/TrueType directory; they have
blanks instead of underscores in the XLFDs for the Bitstream fonts.
The blanks make X barf when it tries to set up these fonts.
I have inspected the defoma hintfile installed with the Bitstream
package. It gives the font families as Bitstream-Vera-Sans,
Bitstream-Vera-Serif, etc., which is (I think) reasonable.
Probably the problem could be avoided for *this* font by changing
the hyphens to underscores; but it seems to me the X utilities
ought to be written to handle such cases gracefully, rather than
making everybody who packages a font worry about replacing (normal)
hyphens with (ugly) underscores in the defoma hintfiles. That's why
I'm filing this bug against xutils (which provides mkfontdir)
and xbase-clients (the package that provides mkfontscale).
It may turn out that both these programs use some common xlib
function to parse fontnames and font-family names, in which case
this bug should be reassigned to the appropriate package.
Note, by the way, that defoma's Defoma::Id module correctly
handles these fonts, installing XLFD names with underscores in the
/var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d/id-cache file.
A further complication is that Bug 219854 says that TrueType fonts
should be using mkttfdir rather than mkfontdir, and that a bug
report should be filed against font packages that violate this.
This is evidently the case with the Bitstream font package; I see my
system doesn't even have the fttools package installed, which should
have been a dependency of the font package if it had used mkttfdir.
It remains to be seen whether mkttfdir handles font-family names
containing hyphens correctly....
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 3.1
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.4.27-2-k7
Locale: LANG=en_US, LC_CTYPE=en_US (charmap=ISO-8859-1)
Versions of packages xutils depends on:
ii cpp 4:3.3.5-3 The GNU C preprocessor (cpp)
ii libc6 2.3.2.ds1-22 GNU C Library: Shared libraries an
ii xfree86-common 4.3.0.dfsg.1-14sarge1 X Window System (XFree86) infrastr
ii zlib1g 1:1.2.2-4.sarge.2 compression library - runtime
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