Debian, Tk, and unreadable fonts.

[Joe Keen]

I recently installed Tk8.4 on a current Debian stable system. The
default font for Tk applications is awful, to the point of almost
being unreadable. No other applications appear to have this problem.

Does anyone know what package I may need to install to get readable
fonts for Tk?

[dkf]

On 24 Mar, 19:00, Joe Keen <joek...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Does anyone know what package I may need to install to get readable
> fonts for Tk?

The simplest way is to upgrade to Tk 8.5 which uses the same font
engine (Xft) as the rest of Debian.

Donal.

[Joe Keen]

Unfortunately my current project doesn't seem to like version 8.5 and
I haven't had the time to go through and fix the problems or event
identify what they really are.

[Jeff Hobbs]

On Mar 24, 12:22 pm, Joe Keen <joek...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mar 24, 12:44 pm, dkf <donal.k.fell...@man.ac.uk> wrote:
> > On 24 Mar, 19:00, Joe Keen <joek...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Does anyone know what package I may need to install to get readable
> > > fonts for Tk?
>
> > The simplest way is to upgrade to Tk 8.5 which uses the same font
> > engine (Xft) as the rest of Debian.
>

> Unfortunately my current project doesn't seem to like version 8.5 and
> I haven't had the time to go through and fix the problems or event
> identify what they really are.

Core Tcl/Tk should be 99.99% compatible from 8.4 to 8.5, so it must be
extra extensions that are preventing this upgrade.

Jeff

[Joe Keen]

> Core Tcl/Tk should be 99.99% compatible from 8.4 to 8.5, so it must be
> extra extensions that are preventing this upgrade.

The only extension I'm using is Itcl. I do have a lot of code in
place implementing most of the mathop functions along with apply and
most of the new list commands. Some of those are definitely causing
trouble and last I looked at it it seemed to be the mathop ones in
particular that were causing the issue.

I tried upgrade it 8.5 and it does look much better but trying to use
Itcl causes a core dump down in Itcl_CreateMemberFunc. Is there a
better set of repositories for tcl than the default?

[Jeff Hobbs]

ActiveTcl - http://www.activestate.com/Tcl

You do need an 8.5-compiled Itcl, as it touches into internal
headers. The one in ActiveTcl does work with 8.5.

Jeff

[Andres Garcia]

Joe Keen wrote:

> I recently installed Tk8.4 on a current Debian stable system. The
> default font for Tk applications is awful, to the point of almost
> being unreadable.

That happened to me too in Mandriva, I solved it by installing
many fonts that were not installed by default, but I don't know
which font it was that did the trick

Andres

[Larry W. Virden]

On Mar 25, 9:50 am, Andres Garcia <fan...@spamme.telefonica.net>
wrote:

> Joe Keen wrote:
> > I recently installed Tk8.4 on a current Debian stable system.  The
> > default font for Tk applications is awful, to the point of almost
> > being unreadable.  

We actually had almost the opposite happen. I installed ActiveTcl
8.5.4 on our redhat system and the developers began to complain about
the font that displayed. Turns out that ActiveTcl 8.5 on Linux is
built using the freetype font support, and the fonts being used were
different enough to cause the developer to be frustrated.

[Joe English]

It may be that you need to *un*install something:
on older Debian systems the 'gsfonts-x11' package (which
makes GhostScript fonts available to X) gave horrible
results in Tk due to XFree86's lousy FreeType rasterizer.
(I've seen this on Woody and Sarge; dunno about Etch or
Lenny.)

In the past, I've also seen X try to scale *bitmap* fonts,
which obviously leads to disaster. Check your Xorg.conf,
make sure that any bitmap font paths are suffixed with ":unscaled",
e.g.,

Section "Files"
...
FontPath "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi/:unscaled"
FontPath "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/:unscaled"
EndSection

While you're in there, check Section "Module" for any of
the following:

Load "freetype"
Load "speedo"
Load "type1"

I usually disable those, too, since historically they have not
worked very well. For core X font rendering (as opposed to Xft,
see below), you really want to stick with bitmap fonts.

Also also: make sure you actually *have* bitmap fonts:
One or both of the 'xfonts-100dpi' and 'xfonts-75dpi' packages
should be installed. (Debian might not install those by
default nowadays, come to think of it, since Gtk+ and Qt
don't use core fonts anymore.)

Lastly: consider upgrading to Tk 8.5, which uses client-side
font rendering via Xft like everybody else does nowadays.

--Joe English