[CLUE-Tech] Goofy Font Problems in GNOME

[Matt Gushee]

Matthew Porter writes:

 > I'm running Debian and Gnome, and a recent "apt-get update" played some kind of havok with my fonts and locale settings.  Various fonts, including all my Gnome desktop fonts, turned into little squares.

Are you running XFree86 4.x? I had a similar problem when I upgraded
one of my boxes from 3.3.6.

 > After some web searching and RTFMing, I seem to have fixed most of the problems by editing my /etc/locale.gen, running locale-gen, and editing my X configuration.  However, there is still one (?) problem that eludes me:

As the above indicates, the problem is related to encodings ... in
what way I'm not entirely sure, but it may be something like: X
expects a Unicode font, but you're using an iso-8859-1 one.

If you are running XFree86 4.x, you might try using the 'xtt' module
instead of 'freetype' for TrueType font support. /etc/X11/XF86Config-4
should have a Modules section, and within that you add a line saying

       Load	      "xtt"

... and remove the "freetype" line if it's there -- you can't use both
modules at once.

That took care of it for me ... of course, I wanted to use xtt anyway,
because I work with Japanese text. I honestly don't know what
advantages there are to using the freetype module in the first place;
I don't know of any, but there must be some, since so many people use
it. Maybe it gives better performance since it doesn't have to handle
as much complexity.

I'm glad you brought this up. I'm doing a KISS presentation on fonts
in January, and I plan to present some common problems and their
solutions. I had forgotten about this, but it would be a good
addition. Please let me know if you find out more.

Matt Gushee