GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 152473
GTK+ crashes trying to use the "Symbol" font in Windows
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
Ok, I'm trying to get this bug fixed via the Gaim bug forum on sourceforge, http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=1027004&group_id=235&atid=100235 but I'm beginning to think it's an issue with GTK. What happens, in a nutshell, is when using gaim on windows (all versions later than .79), if you try to read a greek font (specifically the windows "Symbol" font) that AIM users sometimes put in their profiles, the program crashes with an "Unspecified Fatal Error". Now, this doesn't happen with version .79, which uses GTK+ 2.2.4 Rev d. Instead, it'll just display boxes where the greek characters should be. My theory is that for some reason GTK+ 2.4.7 Rev a can't handle the windows "Symbol" font. And since the newest version of Gaim (gaim.sourceforge.net) uses this version of GTK, it'll crash under said circumstances. Do I have any suggestions?
Symbol is not a "Greek" font, i.e. a font that should be used to write Greek. (Try selecting "Greek" in the "Font Script" entry box in WordPad. You will see that WordPad gladly uses for instance Arial for Greek, too. To actually input Greek characters, you will have to add a Greek keyboard layout, and switch to that, of course.) Symbol is a font that doesn't have a proper Unicode character map as far as I know. It uses some peculiar nonstandard character mapping. Don't use it, it is broken by design. Pango and/or fontconfig doesn't like fonts without Unicode character mappings. The fact that the "font viewer" shows Greek characters when you open the Symbol font is incidental. Symbol contains glyphs that indeed look like Greek characters. but they are mapped wrong, not as Unicode. Many (most?) of the common Microsoft-supplied Windows fonts like Arial, Palatino Linotype, Times New Roman, etc contain the Greek characters with proper Unicode mappings. Thus you should use those for Greek, too. I think there already is a bug for the font-without-Unicode-charmap issue, but don't have time to search for it right now.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 149643 ***