emerging fontconfig breaks AA fonts (again)

lost-distance · n00b Joined: 10 Apr 2003 Posts: 73

AA fonts were working. I emerged fontconfig-2.2.0-r2. AA fonts are no longer working. Sound familiar?

I had a scheme to fix AA fonts after emerging fontconfig (posted Thu Apr 10, 2003), but that no longer works. I've never modified any files in /etc/fonts, and frankly I don't want to know how to modify them. I'm not interested in what fontconfig does or how it works. I just want AA fonts to work. Is that too much to ask?

Sorry for the frustration. And apologies to those working on fontconfig. I'm sure it does something useful. Help - or messages of solidarity - appreciated.

tam · Guru Joined: 04 Mar 2003 Posts: 569

Same here. This sucks!

iwasbiggs · Apprentice Joined: 17 Jan 2003 Posts: 203

Hmm, I got it working for me.
In fact, it changed some fonts around in the gdm (which now look a little better) and xterm.

I was previously using font config 2.1-r1, maybe you guys could try emerging the old version first?
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tam · Guru Joined: 04 Mar 2003 Posts: 569

I was using 2.1-r1, too. Today I've emerge latest, and AA is broken.

barlad · l33t Joined: 22 Feb 2003 Posts: 673

How "broken" are the fonts?
No AA at all ? Some fonts missing?

tam · Guru Joined: 04 Mar 2003 Posts: 569

Not all are broken. Bitstream Vera is ok for example, but Helvetiva isn't.

lost-distance · n00b Joined: 10 Apr 2003 Posts: 73

> How "broken" are the fonts?

That's a good question. Specifically what's broken is AA in Mozilla buttons/menus/bookmarks and where Mozilla displays Japanese fonts. I now see aliased fonts instead, and they look horrible by comparison. Elsewhere AA fonts look ok, for example where Mozilla displays Western fonts, and all fonts in OpenOffice. So maybe it was actually a dormant bug in Mozilla which was exposed by a recent fix to fontconfig. I shouldn't point the finger at fontconfig, but the same thing happened last time I emerged it. Up to that point I had no problems with Mozilla AA fonts, and I haven't changed Mozilla since then.

dek · l33t Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 657 Location: Germany

For me Fixed fonts (Misc/Jis/Sony) are terribly broken. And Opera 7.11B2 does no longer display Verdana but defaults to Arial.

All the other fonts seem to fine.

Olimaus · Posted: Sun May 18, 2003 12:42 am Post subject:

after an update to the newest fonconfig my system is some kind of slowed down.

applications need 2-3 sec. more to start and the cpu load has increased somehow.

what kind of problem could this be?

Twist · Guru Joined: 03 Jan 2003 Posts: 414 Location: San Diego

I will just post this FYI, take it for what it's worth.

For basically months I have always been able to correct font issues with Gentoo in the same manner: build freetype manually or edit the ebuild to not apply the "helpful" patches. There have been so many conflicting posts here about what to do and what works here or there, I have no idea if this will fix things for other people.

But honestly, every time I get a messed up font it's because freetype got overwritten by the official version. I rebuild by untaring the original package and ./configure --prefix=/usr; make install and off I go. Your mileage may vary.

Oh, and delete all of your .font-cache* files afterwards as well.

-Twist
Perfect looking fonts on all five of my gentoo machines =)

tam · Guru Joined: 04 Mar 2003 Posts: 569

Everytime when I've emerged fontconfig or freetype I had problems with fonts afterwards. I hope the ebuild guys will fix it one day.

Olimaus · Posted: Sun May 18, 2003 2:46 pm Post subject:

Sixtiz · n00b Joined: 09 Oct 2002 Posts: 56 Location: Australia

I tried https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=46675 again but this time it din't work...

lude · Posted: Mon May 19, 2003 5:14 pm Post subject:

dek · l33t Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 657 Location: Germany

lost-distance · n00b Joined: 10 Apr 2003 Posts: 73

OK, I've made some progress.

The problem *is* with fontconfig, and possibly with its handling of TrueType fonts in particular.

Applications which don't use fontconfig, such as OpenOffice and my own Japanese OCR software, display the Japanese kochi-mincho TrueType font OK.

Mozilla, which does use fontconfig, displays some awful mess which looks suspiciously like characters selected from multiple Japanese fonts.

That's what I think the problem is: not that AA is broken per se, but that the wrong fonts are being displayed.

I recompiled both freetype and mozilla to see if that would help. Not really.

Then I investigated the dreaded fonts.cache-1 file format. It contains a per-font "charset" value, which encodes the set of Unicode characters comprising the font.

Thinking that was broken, I wrote a simple program to generate the correct encoding of JISX0208-1983 in Unicode. I plugged that back into the truetype fonts.cache-1 file and lo and behold! I got something fairly reasonable. It's not what I had before the emerge of fontconfig. So I'm beginning to think that what I had before wasn't kochi-mincho at all, but some other AA Japanese font (I don't know which). What I have now is AA and is kochi-mincho, so even though it looks different, it actually looks quite good.

The Mozilla buttons/menus/bookmarks are still not in the nice AA font they were before, but I guess that's another story.