Almost all international fonts do not show in gnome for me. I suspect an issue with pango is the problem. Furthermore rxvt segfaults when I "LANG=ja_JP rxvt", but this is not a big problem at hand. I'll attach to sample files next: gedit screenshot should have some text in cyrillic on the first line that I just typed testtext screenshot will be the testtext program from gtk+2. Mozilla works fine with all languages, and I actually use a remote xfs that I used with my previous distribution, so the fonts *are* there.
Created attachment 4770 [details] a screenshot of gedit with cyrillic on the first line
Created attachment 4771 [details] the testtext program from gtk+-2.0
But does this font you are using support those charsets ? if so, is there any interesting output in ~/.gnomerc-errors ?
I guess it is me who doesn't get it but... I tried changing the font in gedit. With two of the listed fonts I was able to see cyrillic, I wasn't able to see japanese though. Nothing of interest in ~/.gnomerc-errors I replaced temporarily my /etc/pango/pangox.aliases with the same file from my working former redhat distro. It didn't help in any way. I am curious as to why I have so little fonts when pango shows them. xfontsel gives me a huge list of fonts... several of them *are* japanese (registry=jisx0208.1983) The only reference to fonts in my /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 is: Section "Files" FontPath "tcp/thunder:7100" EndSection and this is exactly what I had in the last distro. When I do a xlsfonts there is plenty of network traffic between my machine and thunder:7100. When I run gnome-font-properties and play with the fonts (selecting not used until now, bold-italic, hugesized fonts) - I don't have any network traffic. Does that mean that pango is using local fonts only, regardless of my X setting?? I'll keep looking into it, but any pointers are appreciated.
Pango uses Xft for its fonts, so you should check /etc/X11/XftConfig for correct font paths. Im not sure how it handles fontservers, but i think this is a good enough pointer for now ;) What xfree version do you use btw ?
Reading up a bit on pango it seems pango also uses the XF86Config fonts, but i'm not sure how it handles a fontserver (is this any different then a normal font path ?).
Any progress on this reporter ?
Ooops, haven't been trying to fix anything. Don't close the bug yet... I'll get back to you in a day at most.
Responding to all comments. xfree I use is version 4.2.1 as of today. I tried playing with /etc/X11/XftConfig. After a lot of playing I gave up and installed the kochi-fonts package, which provided a few japanese fonts and voila, japanese worked fine. I then renamed /etc/X11/XftConfig to XftConfig.foo and also renamed /etc/X11/fs/config to config.foo. Restarted X and fonts were still OK. I renamed /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts to /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts.foo and NO... after X started, gnome was complaining that it could not find fonts. I tried running X as "XSESSION= startx" ... X started, I got an xterm and stuff... everything was just fine. I started mozilla (still fine)... and I am typing this ... still fine. Right now, I do not think that the X is using ANY local fonts, since the directory fonts is still renamed to fonts.foo. However, gnome is complaining which means that pango is complaining... right? I guess this more or less gives us the solution - pango does not handle remote fontserver fonts. :( That probably means the problem is not fixable here... Funny thing is my former redhat didn't have any fonts locally and japanese was ok. Actually no... I am checking the redhat partition - it does have some, but looking at the fonts.dir files - I think I had more than 1 japanese font to choose from in redhat's gnome2, but I guess I'd update you on that later. BTW, after comparing what I have on my gentoo and in the redhat partition, I see the following differences: the libpangoft2-s1.0.so that came with redhat is linked against libfontconfig.so.1 in addition to other libs, and that version of pango is 1.1, while gentoo's pango is 1.0.5... Just in case this is related. As far as I understood the fontconfig package obsoletes /etc/X11/XftConfig and makes use of xml formatted /etc/fonts/fonts.conf but I am not sure wether this is the only difference.
You are talking RH8 here, it uses Xft2. We don't support that yet. Their pango is a development version, we still uses stable (as we should :)). But fontconfig afaik only checks for local fonts (we do use fontconfig, only with Xft1). Maybe you can add a fontserver to the fontconfig config. The X server fonts (in XF86Config) are handled by libpangox.so btw.
Well, sadly, fontconfig really does seem to be using local fonts only :( I guess I'd have to give the idea of not keeping any fonts locally and symlink them over nfs or something...
Let me know if you discover anything new on this. Closing it for now
