GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 309311
font problem
Last modified: 2005-07-05 10:51:13 UTC
Please describe the problem: I am using GTK+ with the newest version of gAIM for Win32. It has problems recognizing certain fonts, symbol.ttf in particular. Instead of displaying the correct characters, it will show replacements either as boxes or English characters (when they should be Greek characters). Steps to reproduce: 1. Find someone with a wingding or symbol type font in their buddy profile. 2. Look at the profile. Actual results: The profile comes up and the font is not displayed correctly. Expected results: See above. Does this happen every time? Yes. Other information: No.
> when they should be Greek characters No they shouldn't. The symbol font doesn't contain any Greek characters. It contains glyphs that might look like Greek, but the Symbol font doesn't even contain any mapping from Unicode code points (characters) to glyphs, so it is essentially unusable. Some other software might use some horrendous hacks to map the ASCII letters, for instance, to glyph indices in fonts with the "symbol" character set. But pangowin32 doesn't. (In fact, current versions of pangowin32 shouldn't even try to use non-Unicode fonts, so you probably have some outdated version. See bug #149643.) For a font with *proper* Greek characters in it, you need look no further than Arial, for instance. The Arial in XP, at least (version 3.00) contains Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew and Arabic, for instance, in addition to the Latin characters. > Find someone with a wingding or symbol type font in their buddy profile. If people want other to see their "buddy profiles" (whatever that is), they should use a standard encoding, not some ad-hoc crap that depends on a certain font, without Unicode character mapping, being indexed in some uncodumented way. Actually, maybe pangowin32 should be enhanced to support some ad-hoc mapping for symbol charset fonts. But it's not very hight priority, at least for me. Patches welcome.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 149643 ***