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

[Tim Mann]

I pushed a commit that uses "fixed" as a fallback font for missing charsets. It's ugly in large sizes (particularly the clocks), but at least it works.

A nice (?) side effect of this commit is that "fixed" also will be used as a fallback when the user doesn't have helvetica installed at all. Everyone should have "fixed", as I understand it. The nice aspect is that the user without helvetica doesn't get an error message and xboard functions. There is also a not-nice aspect: the fixed font is ugly, so we may get complaints (or users who are unhappy but don't complain) about xboard having ugly fonts, when the real problem is just that they don't have helvetica installed.

On Sun, May 29, 2011 at 6:06 PM, Tim Mann <address@hidden> wrote:

Basically this happens because the helvetica fonts that xboard uses by default don't have Cyrillic characters, at least not the versions of those fonts that you and I have on our machines. (I think we are both using some release of Ubuntu, right? I'm using 10.04.)

I don't understand why we get wrong characters instead of the "missing character" glyph (which usually looks like a grayed-out open box), though.

I am working to find a good way around this. At worst, I can tweak xboard to use the "fixed" font family for charsets that it can't find in helvetica. Unfortunately the fixed-width characters are a bit ugly. So far I haven't found any other fonts that work with xboard and display Cyrillic in xboard successfully, but I am confused about why some of the other fonts I have on my system don't work. I have a number of fonts that xfontsel understands (i.e., they are the X core font style of font, not the new fontconfig style that xboard can't use), and which xfontsel can use to display Cyrillic text, but XCreateFontSet fails and/or I still get incorrect characters with them.

Sigh, none of this should be a problem in the GTK version of xboard since gtk uses fontconfig fonts.

  --Tim

On Sun, May 29, 2011 at 12:10 AM, Arun Persaud <address@hidden> wrote:

Hi

I just pushed the new Ukrainian translation we got from the TP. When
starting xboard (including your new commits) with

LANG=uk_UA xboard

I still get some garbage in the menu names though? I do get Umlaute and
other special characters for

LANG=de_DE xboard

Any idea where this comes from?

ARUN