Font problem under Gnome

[Val]

Hi. I am a new Linux user and I am trying to get Russian fonts working
under Dropline Gnome 2.4.1, XFree86 v4.3.0.

I read a bit about how fonts work under X in various how-to documents, but
I am obviously missing something.

The problem is this - all russian symbols appear as rectangular glyphs
with 4 numbers in the corners, which appear to represent the codes for the
symbol, b/c the numbers are consecutive for consecutive letters.
For example, here are the 1st 4 letters in Russian alphabet (in english)
and the corresponding glyphs I get on the screen (each column in the last
2 lines represents one glygh):
"a" "b" "v" "g" "d".
04 04 04 04 04
30 31 32 33 34

I have cyrillic fonts installed under /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/cyrillic
In that directory I have the encodings.dir, fonts.alias and fonts.dir
files.
In my /etc/X11/XF86Config file I have a line that says:
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/cyrillic/"

I also found another font directory under /usr/X11R6/lib/fonts. What is
the difference? Why are there 2 font dirs?

Despite of everything mentioned above all Russian symbols (typed or in a
browser) still appear as glyphs. I don't know what else to try, so I would
really appreciate any suggestions.
Thanks.

Val

[Denis A. Kaledin]

Val wrote:
> Hi. I am a new Linux user and I am trying to get Russian fonts working
> under Dropline Gnome 2.4.1, XFree86 v4.3.0.

Greetings

> I read a bit about how fonts work under X in various how-to documents, but
> I am obviously missing something.

That is good =)

> Despite of everything mentioned above all Russian symbols (typed or in a
> browser) still appear as glyphs. I don't know what else to try, so I would
> really appreciate any suggestions.
> Thanks.

OK, first of all, let me point you to the HOWTO which describes how to
get proper cyrillic support for Slackware 9.0 (not much has changed,
these instructions do work for 9.1)
http://kmxb.narod.ru/russ1.html

Concerning GTK applications you have 2 options:
1. Install TTF fonts and Type1 fonts from
ftp://ftp.gnome.ru/fonts/urw/release/
Don't forget to run `fc-cache` after adding/modifying fonts.

2. If you're lazy to install the abovementioned fonts for anti-aliasing,
change /etc/profile.d/gtk+.sh to:
GDK_USE_XFT=0

In this case GTK will use ordinary Cronyx fonts without anti-aliasing.

Regards,
Denis

[Val]

On Tue, 06 Jan 2004 10:34:07 +0300, Denis A. Kaledin wrote:
>
> Concerning GTK applications you have 2 options:
> 1. Install TTF fonts and Type1 fonts from
> ftp://ftp.gnome.ru/fonts/urw/release/
> Don't forget to run `fc-cache` after adding/modifying fonts.

Thank you very much for your help, Dennis.
I downloaded the fonts you recommended, installed them, deleted all
fonts.cache-1, fonts.dir and fonts.scale files and finally, ran fc-cache,
mkfontscale and mkfontdir.
Russian fonts are now working properly.
Thanks again.

Val