X11 Font issues
X11 Font issues
- Subject: X11 Font issues
- From: Ben Byer <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 14 Nov 2007 18:45:46 -0800
Several of you have reported X11 font issues on Leopard. It's not
clear to me how many unique problems this is, or how widespread they
are -- but I'm putting this out there in the hopes that you wonderful
people will be able to help me figure out what's wrong (and so you
know that I've been paying attention)
Here's what I'm hearing:
* Font corruption in some apps, specifically OpenOffice (entering text
into cells in the spreadsheet) and Nedit. Characters display as boxes
or empty space. I tried both apps and couldn't reproduce this with
the default settings, but haven't had the chance to dig deeper.
* Font sizing issues, particularly with bold fonts. One report states:
Attached is a screen shot of the following two commands:
xterm -fn "-*-courier-bold-o-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*"
xterm -fn "-*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*"
Those two fonts should be the same size. They're not! I'm not sure
why. If I instead do this:
xterm -fn `xlsfonts -fn "-*-courier-bold-o-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-
iso8859-*" | head -1`
I get an appropriate bold-o font -- which is to say that xlsfonts on
those two patterns returns a completely compatible list of fonts,
but when Xlib is left to its own devices to expand the wildcards, it
picks wildly inappropriate fonts.
Maybe it's a font path problem. I dunno.
Another report says that bold fonts in a remote XEmacs session are
"scrunched and ugly", and there's a screenshot attached which shows
scrunched and ugly fonts that don't even look bold. :(
This may or may not be the same bug as:
When remote emacs clients display on the local X server, the emacs
client's resolution is low, resulting in apparently large font
sizes. It does not seem to effect remote xterms, and does not seem
to happen when the remote emacs client is served from another 10.5
box. However, it happens 100% of the time with Linux clients.
The reporter linked to a thread on the Apple Discussion Forums -- http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=5720364#5720364
-- which says that it's a problem with the default DPI of the
fonts. (The poster there mentions that this could be fixed by editing
xorg.conf -- AFAIK, if you place an xorg.conf in /usr/X11/lib/X11
(instead of /etc/X11), Xquartz will read it, but I haven't had a
chance to try.)
* Some vendors are telling their users that anti-aliased fonts are not
supported on Leopard -- for example, http://community.slickedit.com/index.php?topic=2294.0
. This is a surprise to me, and I'm not sure why it would be the
case.
--
Ben Byer
CoreOS / BSD Technology Group, XDarwin maintainer
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