On Friday 28 September 2001 21:14 pm, you wrote: > Most likely, it's neither an xfs problem nor a problem with the number > of fonts, but some font that crashes the TrueType backend. A pity, I > thought we had squashed all of those in 4.1.0.
I think you're probably correct - if I don't run xfs, it actually kills the X server itself instead! (Also, I know this is offtopic for this particular list, but I'm still experiencing crashes occasionally whilst running certain DRI accelerated OpenGL games - I've got a Matrox G400. Total lockups - I can't kill X, can't switch to a virtual console, just completely frozen. I've had this with Quake III, FlightGear, and Arkanae - it doesn't happen frequently, but it does happen sometimes...). > Could you try working out which font, exactly, crashes the font > server? Then we can try debugging the problem. Ack... I'll give it a go. > The simplest way to do so would be to install your first 500 fonts > only, and see if it happens. Then take the 500 fonts in which you > have located the broken one, and try again with the first 250 fonts of > the batch. Continue narrowing the range further, you should converge > in 10 iterations, 9 if you're lucky. > Alternatively, you could do > > for i in "$(xlsfonts)"; do xfd -fn "$i"; done This doesn't work: Dionysus:/# for i in "$(xlsfonts)"; do xfd -fn "$i"; done bash: /usr/bin/X11/xfd: Argument list too long ;^( I'll have to try the manual method you suggest above. It's a pain having to continually generate the fonts.scale/fonts.dir file for each directory[0]. Incidentally, is there any possibility of eradicating the need for these font description files? Ideally, it would be much better if the server could simply parse the directory on startup and generate the necessary font listing itself, automatically discarding (from it's internal list) any fonts that it is unable to deal with. It's with chargrin that one has to admit that this is one thing that Windows seems to be able to do better than X. A question: How far away is X from having a fully performant (i.e. with large numbers of fonts) font system, running completely anti-aliased, and everything looking beautiful? It seems like it is frustratingly close, but not their yet; if I run KDE with AA, it looks fantastic, but unfortunately the font list displays incorrectly (I'm not sure whether this is a TrueType backend fault, or a bug in QT), and it's just far to slow with parsing the XftConfig file every time an application starts. Certainly, it _does_ work well if you have a small number of fonts (e.g. 50) - but UNIX is about power and performance; I want lots of fonts! ;^) > Oh, by the way: you don't mention your platform, so I assume it is > RedHat Linux, right? Mike, did you apply any local patches to the > TrueType backend in the versions he mentions? Nope. I'm running Debian GNU/Linux (Sid) [Kernel 2.4.10, SGI XFS filesystem] - which is "unstable" which means I'm running pretty much the latest X server and xfs. John [0] One of the main reasons being that some of the free fonts you download contain special characters in their filename, and if only _one_ font can't be parsed, it doesn't initialize the font directory... Some more tolerance would be nice. _______________________________________________ Fonts mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/fonts
