Invisible X Fonts in Sid

From: James Wiggs (wiggs_at_tradingmail.com)
Date: 02/18/04

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    To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
Date: 17 Feb 2004 20:15:35 -0500

     Folks,

       Looking for suggestions on dealing with some problems on a newly
    loaded Debian SID system. We installed Woody, then edited the apt
    sources file to point at unstable and did a dist-upgrade. Overall
    initial installation went very smoothly, but weirdness in X began
    almost immediately. Here's the hardware setup:

    ASUS P2B-D Dual PII motherboard
    Dual PII 450 Deschutes CPUs w/512K cache
    448 MB non-ECC PC100 RAM
    3Com 3C905B-TX Ethernet
    ESS-1968 Maestro 2 sound
    Matrox G400 Dual-Head w/16 MB RAM
    Generic 40X CD-ROM
    6.4 GB Quantum IDE HD
    13 GB IBM IDE HD
    ViewSonic P810 21" Monitor
    IBM P200 20" Monitor

       The 6.4 GB drive has an old installation of NT 4.0 on it which we
    have enabled for dual-boot. The 13 GB is the primary channel master,
    the 6.4 is the secondary channel master, and the CD is the secondary
    channel slave.

       The initial installation was pretty vanilla. After getting the
    base system up and running, we used tasksel to install X, "Desktop
    environment," "File server," "C and C++," "Python," and "Tcl/Tk"
    tasks. The dist-upgrade to SID also went smoothly, if a little
    slow. No major problems in configuation. We pulled down the MGA
    binary drivers from the Matrox site for XFree86 4.2.1, installed,
    and copied back in the original XF86Config-4 file from the old
    RedHat 8.0 installation that was on the box previously, so that
    the dual monitors work as a Xinerama merged display.

       Then the problems began. Bringing up GDM, we saw a login
    dialog with no text labels. The menus had visible text, but the
    input boxes had no labels and neither did the buttons (except for
    the underline beneath the hotkey character). Text in a terminal
    is sometimes visible, sometimes not. Doing an ls listing may or
    may not produce visible output. Very few GNOME applications'
    dialogs show any visible text, but labels on dialog controls like
    buttons and checkboxes and such will often "appear" if you roll
    the mouse over the control so that it is "highlighted". Rolling
    away from the control does *not* cause the text to disappear; it
    stays there once it has been visibly drawn. Also, if a window is
    in the right monitor, and is then dragged into the left (primary)
    monitor, as the window enters the left monitor, the text in the
    *title bar* of the window will be drawn both in the title bar and
    in the corresponding location at the right edge of the *right*
    monitor. If you move the window slowly, you can sometimes catch
    it at just the right moment so that the text is drawn over in the
    right monitor but not redrawn on the title bar of the window, so
    that the portion of the title bar that is in the left monitor's
    display has no title text.

       Now, the amazing appearing/disappearing text phenomenon seems
    to mainly happen to text in the dialogs and widgets and also in
    menus and such. It does *not* happen to text rendered inside a
    Mozilla or FireFox browser window where the rendering is being
    done by Gecko. On the other hand, when Evolution 1.4.5 cranks
    up, there is no visible text in the mailbox selection tree on
    the left or in the message subjects listing at the top. If you
    select a particular message, however, the text of the message
    usually does appear in the message viewing pane.

       There were some random hard lockups, but those were solved by
    installing the 2.4.24 kernel image compiled for 686 SMP. Haven't
    had any crashes since then. The X font problems remain, though.

       While trying to solve this problem, I came across Rob Weir's
    font guide for Debian at http://egads.ertius.org/~rob/font_guide.txt
    and followed the instructions there to the letter. I installed the
    x-ttcidfont-conf package, the msttcorefonts package, and the
    ttf-bitstream-vera fonts. Interestingly, the configuration scripts
    for ttf-bitstream-vera fonts complained about the system not being
    configured to use defoma; however, I had definitely selected that
    option during installation. I then had to manually install the
    x-ttcidfont-conf package and run defoma-reconfigure. Here, then,
    is the "Files" subsection of my XF86Config-4 file:

    Section "Files"
    # The location of the RGB database. Note, this is the name of the
    # file minus the extension (like ".txt" or ".db"). There is normally
    # no need to change the default.
    # Multiple FontPath entries are allowed (they are concatenated together)
    # By default, Red Hat 6.0 and later now use a font server independent of
    # the X server to render fonts.
            RgbPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/rgb"
           FontPath "/var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d/dirs/TrueType"
    # FontPath "/var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d/dirs/CID"
           FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/truetype"
    # FontPath "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/CID"
            FontPath "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/misc"
    # FontPath "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/cyrillic"
            FontPath "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi:unscaled"
            FontPath "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi:unscaled"
            FontPath "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/Type1"
            FontPath "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/Speedo"
            FontPath "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi"
            FontPath "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi"
    # FontPath "unix/:7100" # Not sharing fonts over the network
    EndSection

       For fontconfig, I also edited /etc/fonts/local.conf to include
    this after the <fontconfig> line:

       <dir>/var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d/dirs/TrueType</dir>

       I don't believe the problem is with Xft2 being unable to find
    the fonts, because fc-list returns a pretty comprehensive list of
    fonts. There are plenty of subdirectories under this TrueType
    defoma directory, so I don't think this is the problem either.

       I don't think the problem is in the X driver itself, but rather
    in the font handling subsystems somewhere. If anyone can suggest a
    solution to this problem, I'd be delighted to hear it. If you need
    more information about the details of the configuration, I'll be
    happy to supply them.

    many, many thanks,
    Jim Wiggs 

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