fontconfig failure on Fedora x86_64 systems

[John W. Eaton]

On 11-Sep-2009, Michael D Godfrey wrote:

| I found:
| http://www.khngai.com/tools/man/index.php/man/fonts-conf/5
| 
| which describes how to debug fontconfig problems.
| I tried following the instructions, using settings like:
| setenv FC_DEBUG 1
| 
| This seems to show that many candidate fonts are found, but all
| are rejected.  The ft_manager routine in txt-eng-ft.cc is
| where the problem exists.  I will look some more to try to determine
| the problem, but there is a lot that I do not know about  fontconfig...

When I try starting the current development version of Octave with
FC_DEBUG=1 and execute the commands

octave:1> backend ('fltk')
octave:2> title ("foobar", "fontname", "surelythisisnotafontname")

I see the following output, which apparently shows that Bitstream Vera
Sans was selected as the default font even though I specified a
fontname that is not valid.  What do you see?


FC_DEBUG=1
FC_DEBUG=1
Match Pattern has 23 elts (size 32)
        family: "Bitstream Vera Sans"(w) "DejaVu Sans"(w) "WenQuanYi Zen 
Hei"(w) "Bitstream Vera Sans"(w) "DejaVu Sans"(w) "Verdana"(w) "Arial"(w) 
"Albany AMT"(w) "Luxi Sans"(w) "Nimbus Sans L"(w) "Helvetica"(w) "Lucida Sans 
Unicode"(w) "BPG Glaho International"(w) "Tahoma"(w) "Nachlieli"(w) "Lucida 
Sans Unicode"(w) "Yudit Unicode"(w) "Kerkis"(w) "ArmNet Helvetica"(w) 
"Artsounk"(w) "BPG UTF8 M"(w) "Norasi"(w) "Saysettha Unicode"(w) "JG Lao Old 
Arial"(w) "GF Zemen Unicode"(w) "Pigiarniq"(w) "B Davat"(w) "B Compset"(w) 
"Kacst-Qr"(w) "Urdu Nastaliq Unicode"(w) "Raghindi"(w) "Mukti Narrow"(w) 
"malayalam"(w) "Sampige"(w) "padmaa"(w) "Hapax Berb