After having problems with a few fonts causing the display of certain characters to fail, I was able to track down the culprits using a lengthy search through gucharmap and google. It seems that the "Nimbus" fonts from the package urw-fonts hijack the display of characters from the International Phonetic Alphabet and replace them with Cyrillic characters. A program that's otherwise rock solid also started crashing after I installed them. The fonts hide themselves under unrelated names, and are placed in /usr/share/fonts/default upon installation of the urw-fonts package. They seem to be shipped with ghostscript and abiword too, though, and removing them requires searching for some pretty outlandish filenames, starting with n0. While I'm unable to document that these fonts create any crashes, I've been able to get the characters in question displayed correctly after I uninstalled them, and thus the Nimbus fonts are faulty and probably ought to be scrapped altogether. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install package urw-fonts 2. Try displaying characters #0253, #0265 or #025F... If it looks like upside-down ASCII, try selecting one of the nimbus fonts manually... It should turn Cyrillic. 3. Compare with the description of the characters... Nimbus causes GTK+ to display the wrong characters. Actual Results: Cyrillic characters were displayed. Expected Results: Characters from the IPA should have been displayed. I'm suspecting these fonts may also be in the packages that contain ghostscript-fonts, since they seem to be bundled with ghostscript. And I've also heard about them being bundled with abiword. Basically they're all over, and they're a nightmare to remove. Good luck on this one!
Do you have this problem with urw-fonts-2.1-r1?
I'm afraid I haven't tried it. I might try it later :)
first try, then check back
