GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 98952
BDF fonts not listed, some PCF fonts not rendered properly
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
I have some .pcf fonts that were originally generated from Windows .fon files. These fonts are the original DEC VT100 fonts. When upgrading to Gnome2 I found that these fonts were gone, though xfontsel showed they were properly installed for X use. After a lot of trying, I found out that these fonts were scanned on app startup (testgtk being the test case here), but not recognized as proper fonts and therefore not listed. It was necessary to convert the .pcf files back to .bdf, manually add some headers and convert them back to .pcf. The .bdf fonts would be scanned by pango, but not rendered properly while the unmodified .pcf fonts would render as having zero chracter width. The .pcf generated from the modified .bdf finally worked OK, but size matching is off by a few point sizes. Also, Pango lists the font as being available in all sizes, where there actually are only 4 sizes available. All different versions of the fonts involved are available upon request.
The main issue here has nothing to do with Pango; it woudl be a FreeType or fontconfig issue. Pango just reflects what fontconfig uses. You may want to mail details of the issue to fonts@xfree86.org; which is the right forum for reporting problems with fontconfig. (Note that FreeType/fontconfig can only handle PCF/BDF with a Unicode character map currently) The size issue is different ... Pango just doesn't have an API for dealing with reporting available font sizes; this is an issue that we're aware of, but I just filed bug 99235 to make sure we track it properly.