This may be related to bug #13944, but I am not sure.  Please provide
a bit more information about the font that you are trying to load.
For example, what is the name of that font in "xlsfonts"?  Does it
contain any uppercase letters?  Can you find the font in the Gimp if
you use the font filter in the text tool?

Could you test this again with or without anti-aliasing?  The problem
could also come from the fact that the larger version of the font
requested for anti-aliased text cannot be generated by the X server.

Please add some information to this report about the effects of
toggling the anti-aliasing option and the answers to the questions
mentioned in the previous comment.

I tryed the fonts with and without anti alising.
In oerder the font cant be used anywhere else inside X at almost any
size. In Gimp the font can't be used at any size. 
The font appear in the font filter.
Also the fontname in xlsfont doesn't contain any uppercase letters.
One font hast a number in his name.

Thats all infos i can give you at the moment.

This could be a SuSE-specific problem, because I have seen similar
reports by other people in comp.graphics.apps.gimp and I think that
most of these reports mentioned SuSE 7.2 or 7.3.  So maybe this is a
problem in the SuSE version of the GIMP (or in the font server, but
this is unlikely because the same fonts work in other applications).
Has anybody else seen a similar problem on other Linux distributions?
Or on any other platforms?

*** Bug 80600 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

I just tried to reproduce this problem on a PC running SuSE Linux 7.2
but on which I installed the GIMP 1.2.3 from Ximian GNOME.  I did not
get any errors with most of the fonts that I tried: "bookman I",
"century schoolbook I", "gothic I" and "helvetica" in various weights
and point sizes, with or without anti-aliasing.

But I tried again with the font "fixed (misc)", encoding iso8859-1,
weight medium, 12 points and I got the following error message:
Font '-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal-*-*-100-72-72-c-*-iso8859-1' not
found.
The error occured regardless of whether anti-aliasing was selected or
not.  On the other hand, if I selected 'pixels' instead of 'points'
for the font size, then everything worked and I got the expected text.
I tried also with the dynamic text option (GDyntext plug-in) and I got
a similar error.  But if I disable the anti-aliasing, then it works.

It looks like the problem occurs because the text tool or the dynamic
text plug-in requests a font that is 3 times the normal size in order
to perform the anti-aliasing.  Unfortunately, some bitmap fonts are
not available in all sizes so this generates an error message and the
text cannot be displayed.  I am not sure about the influence of pixels
vs. points for the size selection in the text tool.  Also, it is
strange that the text tool seems to request a font that is larger than
necessary even if the anti-aliasing is disabled (the dynamic text
plug-in doesn't have this problem).

I tried to reproduce this with the GIMP 1.2.3 running on Solaris 8
and I did not have any problems.  I did not test all available fonts,
but I could not find a font that exhibited the "Font not found"
problem.  I also tried the same font as above ("-misc-fixed-...") and
everything worked.

I tried to run the GIMP from the SuSE Linux box with a remote
display on my Solaris 8 machine and everything worked.

Then I tried to run the GIMP compiled for Solaris with a remote
display on the Linux box and I got the "Font not found" errors again.

So it looks like this problem is a combination of several bugs in both
the text tool and the dynamic text plug-in (they should be able to
fall back to the font as requested, without the * 3 factor) and is
also related to the X server used.  Any help or additional information
would be appreciated.  I would like to know if the problem occurs with
other Linux distributions (using XFree84 4.x or other servers).

We should probably disable antialiasing for non-scalable fonts.

The GIMP modifies the fontname under the following circumstances:

If antialiasing is switched on, the font is requested three times
larger. When rendering fails, an error message is displayed that
suggests to turn antialiasing off. I think that's fine so far.

If the size is specified in Points, the image resolution is set
in the XLFD. This may also lead to problems with non-scalable fonts.
Depending on the setting of the antialias toggle, the error message
suggesting to turn antialiasing off is also displayed. Perhaps we
should add an additional message that suggests to specify the size
in pixels?

*** Bug 24631 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

*** Bug 34953 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

I haven't compiled the latest pre-1.2.4 yet, but I tried with 1.2.3
and (as I reported above) turning antialiasing off does not seem to
solve the problem for the text tool: it is still requesting a font
that is three times larger than necessary.  Also, I suppose that the
error message suggesting to turn antialiasing off is a recent
addition to the stable branch, because this does not appear in 1.2.3.

Well, I didn't test it but only looked at the code. If the error
message doesn't appear and the font is requested scaled up even if
antialiasing is turned off and the size is requested in pixels, then
the code is not working as it is supposed to do.

I have checked in a small change to the text tool in the stable branch
that should at least make the error message appear that suggests to
turn off antialiasing:

2002-05-06  Sven Neumann  <sven@gimp.org>

 * app/text_tool.c (text_render): enabled some code that was supposed
 to tell the user to turn of antialiasing if font loading failed. This
 message has been around for a while but wasn't used in the right place.

Created attachment 10725 [details]
font problems in this xcf file

 Hi    
Im also experiencing this, also on a suse linux 8.0 box.    
The weird thing is that in one xcf, the problem occurs, but    
just opening a new file (same size 800x600, white bg) and there's no  
problem  in that one. Good workaround.    
  
Specific questions are welcome.  
thanx to all who look at this.  
Barry  
barry@voeten.com 
  
  
  
  
  
   
details:Running the Suse-rpm version.   
    
   
rpm -qi gimp   
Name        : gimp                         Relocations: (not   
relocateable)   
Version     : 1.2.3                             Vendor: SuSE AG,   
Nuernberg, Germany   
Release     : 57                            Build Date: Mon Mar 25   
13:29:22 2002   
Install date: Tue Jun 11 11:37:02 2002      Build Host:   
stephens.suse.de   
Group       : Productivity/Graphics/Bitmap Editors   Source RPM:   
gimp-1.2.3-57.nosrc.rpm   
Size        : 20015246                         License: GPL   
Packager    : feedback@suse.de   
Summary     : THE image manipulation program   
   

Since no font information is stored in the file the only thing that
could affect the text tool is the image resolution stored in the XCF.
Indeed the pixel resolution is unusual: 0.125 ppi x 0.083 ppi. This
makes up for a print size of approx. 122m x 46m and I doubt that's
what the reporter wants. If used with points the text tool will
request an insanely large font. This request will either be refused by
the X server or (even worse) the X server (or the X font server if
available) will be busy for a very long time.

IMO the only thing we can do here is to improve the error message
being displayed. We need to come up with a useful heuristic that
guesses what went wrong and gives useful hints on what the user should
do about it.

Suggest bumping to 1.2.5

Dave.

Moving to 1.2.6 milestone, since it is looking like there will be a pretty quick
1.2.( release.

*** Bug 84886 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Closing this report as WONTFIX since it definitely only affects
gimp-1.2 and with 2 0 around the door noone should waste time on this
any longer.