On Fri, May 26, 2000 at 07:15:34PM +0200, oliver d tali wrote:
> hi!
>
> since blackbox 0.60.1 i'm having problems with fonts and nls. a while ago
> i wrote about this, but no one had an idea. i have now digged deeper into
> this problem.
>
> first of, if i have my LANG variable set to C, this problem doesn't exist
> at all (http://www.hot.ee/odt/iso8859-1.png). probably, because of the
> ISO-8859-1 character set which then is used. but i'd like to have my LANG
> variable set to et_EE, which stands for estonian and will use the ISO-8859-15
> character set. now instead of the usual lucidasans-10/12 etc. font aliases,
> which most styles use, i get some really weird fonts -(http://www.hot.ee/odt/
> et_EE.png). then i switched to ru_RU which is russian and relies on the
> ISO-8859-5 charset. logged out and in (gnome display manager gdm) again and
> the fonts were also kinda weird, but different (http://www.hot.ee/odt/
> ru_RU.png). i also tested the tr_TR LANG setting (ISO-8859-9) and ended up
> with the same sort of fonts as with ru_RU (http://www.hot.ee/odt/tr_TR.png).
> sv_SE, es_ES and pt_BR don't have that problem, probably also because those
> languages make use of the standard ISO-8859-1 character set i guess. (the
> .pngs are made with the AzureGrace style which has a single font-specific
> line - *Font: lucidasans-10.).
>
> now i'd like to know, are there people out there, who use the ru_RU or tr_TR
> settings and the respective nls files with blackbox? are fonts behaving the
> usual / normal way? does somebody know why i get such weird fonts?
>
> i use the standard x-packages of debian found in the woody/x11 dir. all my
> stuff is of version 3.3.6-6.
>
> on truetype fonts - i replaced all the *font entries in my favorite style
> with ttf lines and learned the following: the fonts are displayed correctly,
> but somehow they are rendered too tall. what's happening there? all my other
> apps which use ttf's don't draw 1pt spaces between lines (the evidence is at
> http://www.hot.ee/odt/ttf-menu.png). anyone else seeing that?
>
All this happens because X fleshes out the provided font to a full font set
by adding additional fonts until it covers all the character sets required
by the locale, and the default fonts for this tend to be rather ugly. This
also means that the max height of text in the font set can be bigger than
the text in the one font you specified. Hence things get drawn funny.
You might try adding a second, smaller font to the list... ie something
like
*Font: firstfont, -*-helvetica-*-*-*-*-8-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
(hope I have the right number of *'s there).
This tells X to use firstfont whenever it can, and then load up a
small helvetica font to cover whatever else it needs. Only if the
available helvetica fonts also don't cover a needed charset will X
resort to its default. (Note : there's nothing special about helvetica
here.)
Because the fall-back font is smaller than our main font, we won't end
up with the wierd spacing problems.
At least, that's my understanding of how it works. If the above idea
doesn't work I can look into it further. Just let me know.
Jeff Raven
