How does Tk know which fonts are available?

[Alan Grunwald]

I've recently upgraded from ActiveTcl-8.6.9 to tcl/tk 8.6.12. I notice
that there are far fewer fonts available with my new configuration.
xlsfonts lists loads of fonts that aren't shown by wish% font families.

Apparently I have made a mistake when building Tk, which I did with

configure --prefix /opt/tcl8.6.12

Please can you help me to correct my configuration?

Many thanks,
Alan

[Ralf Fassel]

* Alan Grunwald <nospam....@gmail.com>

Might be related to the

--enable-xft use freetype/fontconfig/xft (default: on)

configure option.

R'

[Alan Grunwald]

That sounds quite feasible; I've rebuilt Tk via

configure --prefix /opt/tcl8.6.12 --disable-xft

but this has had no effect - I still see the same limited list of fonts
with [font families]

[Rich]

Alan Grunwald <nospam....@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 19/09/2022 16:31, Ralf Fassel wrote:
>> * Alan Grunwald <nospam....@gmail.com>
>> | I've recently upgraded from ActiveTcl-8.6.9 to tcl/tk 8.6.12. I notice
>> | that there are far fewer fonts available with my new
>> | configuration. xlsfonts lists loads of fonts that aren't shown by
>> | wish% font families.
>>>
>> | Apparently I have made a mistake when building Tk, which I did with
>>>
>> | configure --prefix /opt/tcl8.6.12
>>>
>> | Please can you help me to correct my configuration?
>>
>> Might be related to the
>>
>> --enable-xft use freetype/fontconfig/xft (default: on)
>>
>> configure option.
>>
>> R'
> That sounds quite feasible; I've rebuilt Tk via
>
> configure --prefix /opt/tcl8.6.12 --disable-xft

^^^^^^^
If this is how you built it, you *disabled* xft, which will severely
limit the number of available fonts (as pretty much all fonts except
for the old bitmapped ones are provided by the xft library anymore)

> but this has had no effect - I still see the same limited list of fonts
> with [font families]

If you in fact disabled xft, then a limited set of fonts would be the
expected outcome.

[Christian Gollwitzer]

Am 20.09.22 um 12:20 schrieb Rich:

> Alan Grunwald <nospam....@gmail.com> wrote:

>> That sounds quite feasible; I've rebuilt Tk via
>>
>> configure --prefix /opt/tcl8.6.12 --disable-xft
> ^^^^^^^
> If this is how you built it, you *disabled* xft, which will severely
> limit the number of available fonts

Also, keep in mind that you might need some extra headers for building
against xft.

Christian

[Schelte]

On 20/09/2022 12:20, Rich wrote:
> If you in fact disabled xft, then a limited set of fonts would be the
> expected outcome.

Also check the output of `configure`. You should see:

checking whether to use xft... yes

If it says 'no', even when you didn't disable xft, you may be missing
the necessary development package. Add it with `zypper in libXft-devel`,
or whatever incantation your package management system needs.


Schelte.

[Alan Grunwald]

Thanks gents.

I was originally configuring with

configure --prefix /opt/tcl8.6.12

which *should* have had xft enabled. I tried

configure --prefix /opt/tcl8.6.12 --disable-xft

to see whether it had any effect.

I've now reverted to the original command line -

configure --prefix /opt/tcl8.6.12

and checked that the output does indeed include

checking whether to use xft... yes

As far as I can tell I have the development package -

alan@kenneth:~$ sudo apt install libxft-dev
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
libxft-dev is already the newest version (2.3.3-0ubuntu1).
0 to upgrade, 0 to newly install, 0 to remove and 0 not to upgrade.

but I can't find any headers with likely looking names. As far as I can see,

make

has completed without errors.

I also see that the compilation flags -DHAVE_LIBXFT=1 and -DHAVE_XFT=1
are both present. However, I can't find any use of HAVE_LIBXFT in the
sources, and the only use of HAVE_XFT I can find is in tkInt.h, which
includes the line

MODULE_SCOPE void TkUnixSetXftClipRegion(TkRegion clipRegion);

when it is defined; I can't find any reference to TkUnixSetXftClipRegion
anywhere.

(I've got three versions of Tcl/Tk on this system - ActiveTcl-8.6
(8.6.9), the default from Ubuntu (8.6.10) and my homebrew 8.6.12. The
8.6.9 and 8.6.10 versions seem to have a full complement of fonts, it's
just my own poor attempt that has problems.)

Still confused!
Alan

[Alan Grunwald]

I hate it when this happens...

o I found tk.pc, which describes itself as the Tk pkg-config source file
o The Active-Tcl version suggests that wish was linked with -LXrender
o I tried to configure with

configure --prefix=/opt/tcl8.6.12 --with-XRender

it seemed to make no difference.

I then discovered that as well as the expected /opt/tcl8.6.12, I also
had a directory named /opt/8.6.12. Speculating that I'd mistyped the
configure argument (as --prefix=/opt/8.6.12) I retried

configure --prefix=/opt/tcl8.6.12

and [font families] returns loads of fonts - at least comparable with
the number returned by the Active-Tcl and default versions. Most
importantly, when I run tkcon and "the myriad applications I've
developed over the years", the fonts I am accustomed to are used for
menus, dialogs and text widgets.

So, thanks for reading and responding to my ravings; your patience has
allowed me to sort out my problem.

Alan