Re: Trouble with fonts

[Fred Kiefer]

George 'Nephrite' Potapov wrote:

> Hello!
>
> Here's my problem:
>
> I downloaded the latest stable release of GNUstep (make 1.2.1, base
> 1.1.0, gui 0.7.5 and xgps 0.7.5)
>
> configured it with
>
> configure --prefix=/site/GNUstep
>
> and successfully built it
>
> Then I started some applications. And here is the trouble: all
> characters everywhere i.e. in menus, panels and buttons also were
> changed into asterisks ('*') so that applications were totally
> unusuable. Everithing else seems to be fine. So what went wrong and
>  how do I fix it?
>
> I have PentiumII box with Linux Slackware 7.0 installed, kernel
> 2.4.9, XFree86 4.1.0 and use gcc 3.0.1

Looks like this problem is becoming a FAQ. The short answer is that your
font installation does not map to your font usage. And the long answer
is what I posted some weeks ago to a similar question:

> The problem you are getting come from the fact that the xgps backend
>  (when not using Xft) will only use one fixed X font for a given
> font name. If the font "helvetica" is used inside of GNUstep the
> one selected X font, in your case
> "-*-helvetica-medium-r-normal--12-*-*-*-p-*-iso8859-1" is used. So
> only characters (or glyphs) that are available in that font can be
> displayed. The selection which font name to use happens inside the
> font_cacher and is more or less at random (the order fonts are
> listed by the X system).
>
> You can influence the fonts that are available by setting:
>
> defaults write NSGlobalDomain GSFontMask "*iso8859-13*"
>
> and recreating your font cache (by deleting the old one). As has
> been noted by Adam, this is not the best way to go and in the long
> run GNUstep will have to be able to provide different fonts with
> the same encoding. Font sets may be a way to go here.