GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 107434
TTF Font selector crashes gimp on some fonts
Last modified: 2003-03-08 13:20:39 UTC
When I open the font dialog chooser and select certain fonts, gimp crashes with the following error: (gimp-1.3:17671): LibGimpBase-WARNING **: gimp-1.3: wire_read(): error ** (gimp-1.3:17671): WARNING **: Unable to load unicode charmap from font file /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF/arthur__.ttf ** (gimp-1.3:17671): WARNING **: Unable to open font file /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF/arthur__.ttf for font Arthur 18, falling back to /home/kekoa/.fonts/Minnie.TTF ** (gimp-1.3:17671): WARNING **: Unable to load unicode charmap from file /home/kekoa/.fonts/Minnie.TTF, exiting (script-fu:1564): LibGimpBase-WARNING **: script-fu: wire_read(): error I can send you the font if you like, it also does this with some other fonts. The same fonts are read and used correctly by other X applications. At the very least if GIMP doesn't like a font, I suggest a warning dialog, instead of letting it crash completely. I hope this helps! -Kekoa Vincent
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 101856 ***
Seems like a Gimp bug might be present as well. Pango's lack of font support is a pretty big gimp issue.
Nathan, I don't understand your comment. What are you trying to say?
While Pango should be fixed to be able to use more fonts, Gimp shouldn't exit on a bad font. Then again, it looks like it is Pango that is calling exit() -- this is a Bad Idea.
As I wrote in a comment attached to bug #104364, the dependency on Pango can cause some problems. This may be due to the fact that the GIMP and Pango have slightly different goals: in the GIMP, one does not care if the font is not scalable or has a bad charmap. The most important thing is to be able to render some of the glyphs correctly so that they can be inserted in an image. Sometimes, the only thing that the user wants is to insert a single character in the image, so it should also work with fonts having invalid kerning pairs, etc. Because Pango tries to render the whole text correctly (using the correct encoding, spacing, etc.), it will reject some fonts that would otherwise be perfectly acceptable for graphic design.
You are not suggesting that we develop a complete new font framework, are you? Pango has so many advantages and if there are problems, we can always fix them in Pango. I more or less have free hand to commit fixes to PangoFT2 and I am working with Owen and Keith to get this issue fixed. Please stop bitching about Pango!
Our users will "stop bitching about Pango" when it works. ;)
Is there some program that I can use that will tell me beforehand which fonts pango doesn't like? It's hard to always guess which font to use. I'd like to just get rid of all the fonts that aren't supported, to prevent crashing all the time. Or is there some pango library we can use to check the fonts ourselves? Thanks! -Kekoa
Pango just shouldn't crash. Please report this problem against bug #101856.