On Wed, 1 May 2019, Jamie Zawinski wrote:
-arabic-newspaper-medium-r-normal--19-140-100-100-p-0-iso10646-1
I'm gonna guess that this font, despite claiming to be 10646 (Unicode) does not
actually contain Latin characters... So that's not ideal if your locale is set
to one that requires those.
That sounds likely...
It looks like you've got a smattering of Arabic and Japanese fonts, but all of
your Latin fonts are fixed-width! Is that intentional? By which I mean is, did
you do this on purpose or is your distro doing this by default for some reason?
Maybe you manually deleted some package that you shouldn't have?
It's certainly not intentinoal in the sense of uninstalling things. But the
system in question _is_ an intentionally fairly minimal vm/container setup
for a specific build environment. In particular, this container was setup
with APT::Install-Recommends (and Suggests) disabled.
Are any of your apps capable of displaying Latin letters in variable width? If
so, my next question will be, what font are those apps finding and how?
Yep ... Chrome, VS Code, all the basic LXDE apps, kdiff3, pgAdmin III,
LXTerminal's preferences screen, all render just fine. but I think those
are all using TrueType fonts via fontconfig/etc, not "traditional" X11
fonts.
My list of installed packages providing files under /usr/share/fonts (i.e.
dpkg -S /usr/share/fonts passed through some cleanup) is:
fonts-cantarell
fonts-dejavu-core
fonts-dejavu-extra
fonts-droid-fallback:
fonts-freefont-ttf
fonts-hack
fonts-liberation
fonts-noto-cjk
fonts-noto-core
fonts-noto-mono
fonts-noto-ui-core
fonts-noto-unhinted
fonts-opensymbol
fonts-quicksand
fonts-roboto-unhinted
fonts-symbola
xfonts-base
xfonts-encodings
xfonts-scalable
xfonts-utils
The following patch might help: this will remove the wildcard font-family fallback, which
should result in the xscreensaver dialogs being in "fixed" instead of that
Arabic font. But I'd still like to understand how your machine got into this state, and
how likely it is that others will also be dealing with similar configurations.
The patch works with precisely the expected effect, yes.
PS: Thanks for all your help following up on this :)
--
-- Matt
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away".
-- Philip K. Dick
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