GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 104364
Does not start without TrueTypes
Last modified: 2003-11-02 15:23:05 UTC
When I start gimp I get: No fonts found; this probably means that the fontconfig library is not correctly configured. You may need to edit the fonts.conf configuration file. More information about fontconfig can be found in the fontconfig(3) manual page and on http://fontconfig.org My fonts.conf was all okay. I tracked it down and found that gimp only starts when at least one TrueType font is installed. I had several screenfonts and Type1 fonts installed, but gimp only starts with TrueType.
The text tool needs at least one font configured for use by PangoFT2 and this does _not_ have to be a TrueType font. Could you please attach the fonts.conf that you claim would be OK ? Anyway, there is not much we can do about this since the error message is from Pango and Pango also quits the application if not at least one font is present.
I think that the dependency on PangoFT2 for the text tool is an issue that is worth a discussion on the developers mailing list. I have a large number of high-quality bitmap fonts on my Solaris box and I use them frequently with gimp-1.2.x. They are not scalable, but they look very good at small point sizes. I also have some Type1 scalable fonts but no TrueType fonts. I recently started using a remote font server from a Linux box in order to be able to use some TrueType fonts, but I found that some of these free fonts have bad mapping tables and are not usable by PangoFT2, although they work fine in other programs (as long as you stick to the ASCII chars and do not try other encodings). As a result, gimp-1.2.x works fine and has a bit more than 480 unique fonts available (more than 4000 in total, if the various sizes are counted). But gimp-1.3.x cannot start unless I use the remote font server, and then it can only use about 10 fonts (the MS web fonts that I saved before MS stopped distributing them). A related problem is described in bug #101856 (PangoFT2 and Unicode charmaps).
You should be able to use almost all your fonts with PangoFT2. Only those that are considerably broken won't work. Freetype renders Type1 fonts and I think it can also handle your bitmap fonts. The latter might need some special handling in the text tool.
Created attachment 13852 [details] Here is my font.conf
Did you analyse it?
Your font configuration looks fine to me but I couldn't reprocude your problem and I have no idea what could be causing it.
I might be wrong but I think you need to run fc-cache as root in order to generate the fontconfig cache files in your font directories. Could you please check if that fixes your problem and report back ?
No that does not fix it. As soon as I remove all Truetype fonts it does not start and as soon as I add one it starts.
Raphael, for your information: After Yosh's and my latest changes you can now use bitmap fonts with PangoFT2 and GIMP.
Changes at the request of Dave Neary on the developer mailing list. I am changing many of the bugzilla reports that have not specified a target milestone to Future milestone. Hope that is acceptable.
This could be fixed in the pre 2.0 stage or in the future.
This report is simply bogus. I verified that GIMP does indeed work w/o any TrueType fonts. All it needs is at least one single font. The problem with your fonts.conf is that you explicitely alias Sans to a couple of TrueType fonts you don't install. If you remove these lines, GIMP will work with nothing but Type1 fonts.