The Fonts Are Displayed As Small Boxes in Some Application Menus

Support knowledgebase (swiegra_kaestchenfonts)
Applies to

SuSE Linux: Version 7.3
XFree86: Version 3.3.6

Symptom

The fonts are displayed as small boxes in the menu of various applications such as RealPlayer, nedit, and gnumeric.

Cause

Some UNICODE fonts like, for example, -*-helvetica-medium-r-normal--12-*-iso10646-* are installed on the system. Since the X server arranges the fonts in alphabetical order, it finds first a UNICODE (iso10646) font instead of a more suitable ISO8859 font.

Solution approach

By using XFree86 4.2.0 instead of XFree86 3.3.6., the fonts will no longer be arranged in alphabetical order, but numerically. XFree86 4.2.0 can be downloaded e.g. from the FTP server:

ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/linux/suse/ftp.suse.com/suse/i386/supplementary/X/XFree86/XFree86-4.2.0-SuSE/

There you can also find a README describing the installation. Please refer to the following article from our support database for more information about updates and configuration with SaX2:

"X Server Configuration with SaX2" (http://sdb.suse.de/en/sdb/html/wessels_sax2.html)


For experts only:

If you want to keep on using XFree86 3.3.6, at /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/ you can create a file for each application (nedit in the example) with the following content:



        nedit*fontList: fixed
          |               |
          V               V
      (application name)      (or some other font like
                        -*-courier-medium-r-normal--12-*-iso8859-* )

This entry can also be inserted in the file ~/.Xdefaults in the user's home directory.

We would like to thank Mr. Christian Schmidt-Guetter for providing us with this solution.


Keywords: SMALL BOX, SMALL BOXES, REALPLAYER, NEDIT, GNUMERIC, FONT, FONTS

Categories: X Applications , Applications

SDB-swiegra_kaestchenfonts, Copyright SuSE Linux AG, Nürnberg, Germany - Version: 18. Feb 2002
SuSE Linux AG - Last generated: 05. Apr 2002 by ip (sdb_gen 1.40.0)