Re: [XForms] Fonts used by Xforms on recent Fedora

[Jens Thoms Toerring]

Hi Marcus,

On Tue, May 04, 2010 at 11:35:44AM -0400, Marcus D. Leech wrote:
> Anyone know which *specific* font packages I need on a Fedora system to
> get XForms-based
>   applications to render correctly-sized text?
> 
> On a "default" F11 and F12 installation, the text sizes are
> wrong--spilling outside of their containing
>   objects, etc.
> 
> If I do a "yum install "*fonts*" the problem goes away, but I don't know
> *which* fonts actually fix the  
>    problem--that install installs about 280 different font packages, and
> I'm pretty-sure they can't
>   *all* be necessary for Xforms to render text appropriately :-)
> 
> My first thought was the "xorg-x11-fonts*" fonts, but they don't appear
> to be the ones (removing them
>   doesn't cause text rendering to suddenly be broken again).
> 
> Any clues?

Per default XForms will try to use X fonts that fit the
following patterns:

   -*-helvetica-medium-r-*-*-*-?-*-*-p-*-*-*
   -*-helvetica-bold-r-*-*-*-?-*-*-p-*-*-*
   -*-helvetica-medium-o-*-*-*-?-*-*-p-*-*-*
   -*-helvetica-bold-o-no*-*-*-?-*-*-p-*-*-*

   -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-?-*-*-m-*-*-*
   -*-courier-bold-r-*-*-*-?-*-*-m-*-*-*
   -*-courier-medium-o-*-*-*-?-*-*-m-*-*-*
   -*-courier-bold-o-*-*-*-?-*-*-m-*-*-*

   -*-times-medium-r-*-*-*-?-*-*-p-*-*-*
   -*-times-bold-r-*-*-*-?-*-*-p-*-*-*
   -*-times-medium-i-*-*-*-?-*-*-p-*-*-*
   -*-times-bold-i-*-*-*-?-*-*-p-*-*-*

   -*-charter-medium-r-*-*-*-?-*-*-*-*-*-*
   -*-charter-bold-r-*-*-*-?-*-*-*-*-*-*
   -*-charter-medium-i-*-*-*-?-*-*-*-*-*-*
   -*-symbol-medium-r-*-*-*-?-*-*-*-*-*-*

with the '?' (at the point size position) set to 10 times
the requested 'size' value, i.e.

FL_TINY_SIZE        8
FL_SMALL_SIZE      10
FL_NORMAL_SIZE     12
FL_MEDIUM_SIZE     14
FL_LARGE_SIZE      18
FL_HUGE_SIZE       24

As a last resort (i.e. in case a font can't be found) it
uses the fonts "fixed" and "6x13". All the information
about font sizes gets obtained from the X server.

If you can get these fonts loaded with e.g. the 'xfd' utility,
using for example

xfd -font '-*-helvetica-medium-r-*-*-*-100-*-*-p-*-*-*'

without a warning message the font should be available on
your system. I have no experience with newer Fedora systems,
but on all systems (Debian/Ubuntu lately) they were all
there.

One possible problem could be the following (but I can't
say for sure!) that these fonts are typically available for
75 dpi and 100 dpi. If you have a rather different screen
resolution, which you can find out by using

xdpyinfo | grep resolution

or if the actual resolution is e.g. around 100 dpi but
only the 75 dpi fonts are installed (or vice versa) the
size information returned by the X server might not be
correct. Perhaps installing additional fonts with yum
results in previously not installed 100 dpi fonts becoming
available on a 100 dpi system etc. But please note that
this is pure guesswork, I could be completely wrong.

                        Best regards, Jens
-- 
  \   Jens Thoms Toerring  ________      address@hidden
   \_______________________________      http://toerring.de