X font problem!

May 21, 2005 3:49 PM

I have a nice wide screen display (Sony P234) on a linux box. It's usually beautiful but on many applications there's a font problem. When it happens all the fonts appear as boxes.

It mostly happens with older applications and I'm assuming that it's not finding a matching font on my system. How can I figure out what font is missing? I never get an error or warning message.

posted by substrate to computers & internet (6 comments total)

Which Linux? When you say applications, is it the application's own fonts (i.e. menus or dialog boxes), or fonts for content being displayed by the application?
posted by airguitar at 5:41 PM on May 21, 2005

It's the application's menus. I'm running Fedora Core 3. Most applications behave fine but a few, especially older ECAD applications don't behave nicely. My suspicion is that because of the high resolution of the display it's trying to get a certain dpi font and failing.
posted by substrate at 6:17 PM on May 21, 2005

The older apps are probably requesting bitmapped fonts, which usually come in 75 and 100 dpi varieties. The 100 dpi fonts may not be installed on your system. Seems like the package you'd need for those is "fonts-xorg-100dpi".
posted by zsazsa at 7:12 PM on May 21, 2005

Thanks, I'll give that a shot when I get back to work.
posted by substrate at 7:46 PM on May 21, 2005

No joy. 75 and 100 dpi packages are already installed.
posted by substrate at 6:09 AM on May 23, 2005

I got it working by forcing it to load fonts via my .Xdefaults. To find the strings to place in their I ran the binary through strings and grepped for fontList.
posted by substrate at 11:39 AM on May 23, 2005