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

[Tim Mann]

I learned a bit more, but progress is slow.  Here are some observations:

* I was able to "fix" the slightly broken ru.po file that we have and get the Russian translation to work. I didn't really know what I was doing; I just did "make ru.gmo" and made likely-looking changes in places where I was getting error messages and/or where the file header differed from the examples that work. I notice we have some other broken translations, so maybe those are fixable too. Maybe I should fix these and push a commit?

* Interestingly, the Russian translation is able to use the Microsoft TrueType core fonts for the web that I have installed on my Ubuntu 10.04 system (they come from the ttf-mscorefonts-installer package). For instance, the flags -messageFont "-*-arial-medium-r-normal--*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*" -clockFont "-*-arial-bold-r-normal--*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*" -coordFont "-*-arial-bold-r-normal--*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*" make that work, and the fonts look nice, though I didn't check all the board sizes to be sure everything fits right. This is much better than helvetica backed up by fixed.

* For some reason that isn't clear to me, the Ukrainian translation is *not* able to use those fonts. They also cannot be used in the en_US.utf8 locale. In both cases, XCreateFontSet always returns an error after failing to find a font for *any* charset.

I think I have tracked the failure down to the  /usr/share/X11/locale/*/XLC_LOCALE file that gets chosen, but I don't know what the problem with it is yet. This highly cryptic file controls how XCreateFontSet chooses fonts for a locale. The ru_RU.utf8 locale has its own XLC_LOCALE file, while the uk_UA.utf8 locale doesn't have one and is configured to use the one for en_US.utf8 instead. (This is determined by /usr/share/X11/locale/locale.dir and locale.aliases. All of this stuff is part of X, not something we supply with xboard.) For some reason the en_US.utf8 XLC_LOCALE file has criteria that cause XCreateFontSet to reject all the Microsoft fonts, while the Russian one accepts them, or at least enough of them to get the job done.

I don't know if there is any practical way for us to work around an issue in the XLC_LOCALE file, but if I finish tracking this down I can try reporting it upstream.

On Sun, May 29, 2011 at 8:41 PM, Tim Mann <address@hidden> wrote:

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