Is there a way to debug fontconfig's font selection? I did a dist-upgrade on my Sid laptop this morning and upon restarting icewm its fonts had vanished. It only happens with one icewm theme, so it would seem to be a font selection problem. But I can't figure out what changed to cause the problem. The problem was discussed on the icewm mailing list[1] and there's a bug against the icewm package[2].
I assume the X experts know how to debug problems like this. Fonts are a common topic on debian-user, and there's a lot of HOWTOs and setup examples, but I have not found anything that helps me debug problems. It's my basic lack of understanding of X, of course. Do any of you know of a good font _debugging_ howto? For example, in icewm it seems like this font family: -artwiz-snap-regular-r-normal-sans-10-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*" is the problem. I probably don't have that font installed, but I assume previously there was a font substitution happening that worked, and now there's a different font substitution happening that doesn't display. But that's just my guess. Is there a way to debug that font selection process? My limited understanding is the application uses fontconfig to find a font, then X for rendering that font. I think it would be very helpful for me (in debugging problems like this) to be able to watch the font selection process for an application. For example, I would like to watch what font icewm is requesting, and what actually gets selected and rendered. Is there a way to do that? [1] http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=3305608&forum_id=5805 [2] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=214677 And a similar request to fontconfig list some time back: http://mail.fontconfig.org/pipermail/fontconfig/2003-July/000508.html -- Bill Moseley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
