[gentoo-user] xosview fails to launch with missing font 7x13bold

[Jack]

After a reboot today, to switch to 4.14.8-r1, x11-misc/xosview-1.19
(installed last March) fails to launch with "xosview: display :0 cannot
load font 7x13bold"

7x13bold is from media-fonts/font-misc-misc - I have 1.1.2-r1 installed
12/16. I can't tell what changed in the font file, as
packages.gentoo.org has hardware problems, and fails on any search
attempt. font-misc-misc does include 7x13B, but I don't know for sure
if that is a valid alias, or if something changed since the last
version, 1.1.2, which was emerged in 2010!

Before today, I haven't rebooted since 12/6, so my first guess is some
problem with font-misc-misc. 7x13B is listed in both fonts.alias as
-misc-fixed-bold-r-normal--13-120-75-75-c-70-iso8859-1 and fonts.dir as
-misc-fixed-bold-r-normal--13-120-75-75-c-70-iso10646-1 in
/usr/share/fonts/misc, which differ only in the iso number. The latter
does show up in the output of xlsfonts, but not the former. Even
stranger, fonts-alias is much older than everything else in that
directory - from when I last emerged media-fonts/font-alias. Is this
perhaps a bug in fonts-alias which needs to be updated to reflect
changes in font naming in other packages? Reinstalling font-alias did
not help.

I then duplicated the line in fonts.alias, changing one of them to the
other iso number. That didn't help without restarting X, but after a
restart, xosview runs. (It now gives me a totally unrelated error -
but I'll deal with that one later.)

Should I file a bug against either font-misc-misc or against
font-alias, or do I have a local configuration error?

Thanks for suggestions.

Jack

[Ian Zimmerman]

I am looking at this now because portage wants to update these package
for me too and I don't want any mess.

So, I think you're mixing apples and oranges a bit: 7x13bold is a real
valid alias, but 7x13B is just the (base) name of the font files; it is
not surprising that the latter not accepted as a font name. The fonts.dir
file is the authoritative one for which "real" fonts (ie. not aliases)
exist on the system. The first column there is the font file name (ffn)
and the second column is the X font name contained in $ffn.

I still have the previous version of font-misc-misc, and in fonts.dir I
see entries both for iso10646-1 and for iso8859-$i where 1<=i<=16. Does
your version have the latter entries? I should quote this part of
fonts.dir verbatim:

7x13B-ISO8859-1.pcf.gz -misc-fixed-bold-r-normal--13-120-75-75-c-70-iso8859-1
7x13B-ISO8859-10.pcf.gz -misc-fixed-bold-r-normal--13-120-75-75-c-70-iso8859-10
7x13B-ISO8859-11.pcf.gz -misc-fixed-bold-r-normal--13-120-75-75-c-70-iso8859-11
7x13B-ISO8859-13.pcf.gz -misc-fixed-bold-r-normal--13-120-75-75-c-70-iso8859-13
7x13B-ISO8859-14.pcf.gz -misc-fixed-bold-r-normal--13-120-75-75-c-70-iso8859-14
7x13B-ISO8859-15.pcf.gz -misc-fixed-bold-r-normal--13-120-75-75-c-70-iso8859-15
7x13B-ISO8859-16.pcf.gz -misc-fixed-bold-r-normal--13-120-75-75-c-70-iso8859-16
7x13B-ISO8859-2.pcf.gz -misc-fixed-bold-r-normal--13-120-75-75-c-70-iso8859-2
7x13B-ISO8859-3.pcf.gz -misc-fixed-bold-r-normal--13-120-75-75-c-70-iso8859-3
7x13B-ISO8859-4.pcf.gz -misc-fixed-bold-r-normal--13-120-75-75-c-70-iso8859-4
7x13B-ISO8859-5.pcf.gz -misc-fixed-bold-r-normal--13-120-75-75-c-70-iso8859-5
7x13B-ISO8859-7.pcf.gz -misc-fixed-bold-r-normal--13-120-75-75-c-70-iso8859-7
7x13B-ISO8859-8.pcf.gz -misc-fixed-bold-r-normal--13-120-75-75-c-70-iso8859-8
7x13B-ISO8859-9.pcf.gz -misc-fixed-bold-r-normal--13-120-75-75-c-70-iso8859-9
7x13B.pcf.gz -misc-fixed-bold-r-normal--13-120-75-75-c-70-iso10646-1

Does yours contain all these lines? And if it does, do the files (as
named in the 1st column) exist in /usr/share/fonts/misc/ ?

--
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[Ian Zimmerman]

[replying to self]

On 2017-12-25 18:30, Ian Zimmerman wrote:

> On 2017-12-23 18:09, Jack wrote:
>
> > After a reboot today, to switch to 4.14.8-r1, x11-misc/xosview-1.19
> > (installed last March) fails to launch with "xosview: display :0
> > cannot load font 7x13bold"
> >
> > 7x13bold is from media-fonts/font-misc-misc - I have 1.1.2-r1
> > installed 12/16. I can't tell what changed in the font file, as
> > packages.gentoo.org has hardware problems, and fails on any search
> > attempt. font-misc-misc does include 7x13B, but I don't know for
> > sure if that is a valid alias, or if something changed since the
> > last version, 1.1.2, which was emerged in 2010!

After taking a first look: have you perhaps switched off the nls USE
flag (or maybe the new profile did that)? I believe your symptoms are
compatible with this hypothesis.

[Jack]

On 2017.12.25 22:35, Ian Zimmerman wrote:
> [replying to self]
>
> On 2017-12-25 18:30, Ian Zimmerman wrote:
> > On 2017-12-23 18:09, Jack wrote:
>>> After a reboot today, to switch to 4.14.8-r1, x11-misc/xosview-1.19
>>> (installed last March) fails to launch with "xosview: display :0
>>> cannot load font 7x13bold"
> > >
>>> 7x13bold is from media-fonts/font-misc-misc - I have 1.1.2-r1
>>> installed 12/16. I can't tell what changed in the font file, as
>>> packages.gentoo.org has hardware problems, and fails on any search
>>> attempt. font-misc-misc does include 7x13B, but I don't know for
>>> sure if that is a valid alias, or if something changed since the
>>> last version, 1.1.2, which was emerged in 2010!
>
> After taking a first look: have you perhaps switched off the nls USE
> flag (or maybe the new profile did that)? I believe your symptoms
> are compatible with this hypothesis.

Yes, re-emerging font-misc-misc with nls allows xosview to start. It
about doubles the size of /usr/share/fonts/misc, but only from about
2.7 to 5.1M.

However, as I said, I have not change -nls in my make.conf recently, so
I'm not sure what else might have changed. At this point, probably not
worth any effort to pursue further.

Thanks for the hint.

Jack