Re: [Bug-XBoard] [bug #33241] xboard quits with "Unable to create font set."

[Tim Mann]

On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 12:28 AM, h.g. muller <address@hidden> wrote:

I can add that so far I have not even succeded to get as far as running into this
error message; my attempts to run a foreign language lways end in the message
that the C library did not supports it, and then it runs fine (but in English).

I don't have an answer for the main problem, but I do have a suggestion about this one.

Run "locale -a". If you don't see the locale for the language you are trying to use in the list, then you need to install more packages. I don't remember if you said what distro you are using. On my Ubuntu 10.04, under System > Administration > Language Support > Install / Remove Languages, I was able to install German and I could then run xboard with LANG=de_DE.utf8.

This revealed a problem, though: characters with umlauts display as two garbage characters: Ã followed by something else. This looks like the typical symptom of trying to display utf8 text as if it were some single-byte encoding.

Hmm, I bet this is related to Auguste's problem. Looking at the ~/.xboardrc file that was created, all the fonts have the -iso8859- suffix, which IIRC means single-byte encoding.  xboard wants to find iso10646 fonts instead, at least when using a utf8 locale. Something is probably wrong with xboard's NLS font selection code that lets it match fonts with any encoding instead of looking for iso10646. (I don't know what, though... I didn't write that code.)

  --Tim