hi,

i have been having some sort of a stupid problem with my emacs since day1 and i dont know whats wrong.. i can vaguely remember that it was ok during my partial set up process, meaning while i was getting the system to a level i would be satisfied with the stuff i have.. (note that i am relatively new to linux world)

with a search on the error message i found such a thread but unfortunately it didnt help a lot, assuming that not many people have seen my reply there i would like to leave the link here:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=114535

in short terms, the problem is as follows:
when i start emacs, all the characters on emacs window, including the menus are shown as empty rectangles.... whatever i may type are also rectangles...
on the shell i ran emacs i found this error message:

Warning: Cannot convert string "-*-helvetica-medium-r-*--*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1" to type FontStruct

i tried to uninstall and reinstall again (i installed emacs21 and then xemacs21, thought the problem was originating from xemacs, but removing that didnt solve a thing) and tried the steps mentioned in the thread above, the problem is most of the things there dont apply to my system...

i would really appreciate if somebody could give me some tips on this, thnx

BTW: i am using a debian distrobution with 2.9.1 kernel and sid (unstable) version

hi there,

do you have a .emacs file ?? if you have, the problem can be there.
so, if you have a init file, try at the terminal
.
if this one does not solve, try
and keep in touch...

regards

slackie1000

hi slackie

a search for .emacs gave these results:

/usr/bin/b2m.emacs21
/usr/bin/ctags.emacs21
/usr/bin/ebrowse.emacs21
/usr/bin/emacsclient.emacs21
/usr/bin/etags.emacs21
/usr/bin/grep-changelog.emacs21
/usr/bin/rcs-checkin.emacs21
/usr/share/gtkhtml-3.1/keybindingsrc.emacs
/usr/share/xemacs21/xemacs-packages/lisp/ilisp/ilisp.emacs


while the possible solutions u mentioned didnt help a lot..

what exactly should i have instead of "variable" there?

thanks

i think this is not an emacs bug but rather some bug in debian that i bet is not causing the problem

try just starting emacs without any arguments and from the menu choose
Options -> Mule
set language to your language then use the set font options and see if you can get it to where it looks ok to you then go
Options -> save options

or an alternative is to make a file in your home directory called .Xresources and put in it
emacs.font: *fixed-bold-r-*-15-*-*

i have also seen this written
Emacs.default.attributeFont: -*-*-medium-r-*-*-*-120-*-*-m-*-*-*

both syntax work
then after saving or changing that file type
xrdb .Xresources
to read it in
(it's read automatically when you log in otherwise)

of course any font you actually have will do

i also think make a .emacs file in your home directory and put in it
(setq scalable-fonts-allowed t)

might help
and also will get you started on your own .emacs file which is an important thing to learn to use

see if that helps

erm... i cant really say i understood that one fully...

At which step did you get lost?


Cheers,
Tink

hi there,

i don't get it. he wrote that even the menu fonts are rectangular.
how can he start emacs in X and go to the menu and change the font?
somehow he need to change the font before. IMHO, it is clear that there is a problem with the default font. problem something related to the Debian package.
he needs to change the font argument. somehow call emacs with an existing font.

regards

slackie1000

agreed with slackie menus are not readable.. and besides i was lost in the stage of creating and moving special files around... if you guys mention some specific file, or something you gotta take it simple and step by step so that i can get it...

*ashamed by his apparent lack of knowledge*

hi there,

so, i think my first mail was a bit bad written. i clarify now.
invoking emacs with the option "-q" you ignore the config file
i thought you could have some strange font definition in your config file.
the second idea is changing the font in the command line.
with the parameter "-fn" you can give the font name. this is equivalent to change it in Xresources or Xdefault file.
the hard task is to find which font is available in your system.
there is no shame, mate. we are all newbie.

regards

slackie1000

hi all,

through some use of xfontsel and emacs -fn <fontname> i managed to see characters on my emacs window...

btw my mistake, characters on the menus are readable but not the popup descriptions for them... i apparently was remembering wrong.. but the suggestions above (regarding to menus) dont work anyways... emacs quits itself for no apparent reason..

now after being able to use a certain font and having some characters, following a friends advice i tried to save options, which would presumably save the font settings as well.. unfortuantely it didnt... but now i have a .emacs file and a .emacs.d directory in my home directory...

.emacs file looks like this as of now:

GNU nano 1.2.4 File: .emacs

(custom-set-variables
;; custom-set-variables was added by Custom -- don't edit or cut/paste it!
;; Your init file should contain only one such instance.
'(case-fold-search t)
'(current-language-environment "Latin-1")
'(default-input-method "latin-1-prefix"))
(custom-set-faces
;; custom-set-faces was added by Custom -- don't edit or cut/paste it!
;; Your init file should contain only one such instance.
)


how should i modify it?

Thanks, everybody...

the new situation is as follows..

i have been actively asking and trying to acquire info on #debian @freenode... first of there wasnt any .Xdefaults or .xsession files in my home directory...(actually as far as i can recall not anywhere else either)-... i tried to create a .Xdefaults file as suggested by some, over there.. it now contains:

#emacs*font: 10x20
emacs, xemacs
emacs*Background: DarkSlateGray
emacs*Foreground: Wheat
emacs*pointerColor: Orchid
emacs*cursorColor: Orchid
emacs*bitmapIcon: on
emacs*font: fixed
emacs.geometry: 80x25


two different settings i tried.. first one commented out... both ways, still doesnt help...

then i decided that it might as well be a configuration corruption or so... so i purged all packages related to emacs, emacsen, xemacs etc.. then apt-get install emacs21, hoping that it would be a clean start... too bad, i was mistaken....

i have also realised that people have been telling me that an asterisk is missing in the error message i get... i am starting to think that there is just no such font... i might need to change the font libraries, or better font settings...

tried that it gives segmentation fault and kills itself... (when u pick a language, or a font)


too big.. :S and btw only the first line works with me.. i tried to change 15 to 12 but there wasnt such a font.. i tried something else and now it works...



there wasn't anything about fonts in .emacs as u can see from my previous post... my question is what kind of parameters one can use in there.. what's the general way of modifying, like what to do, and what not to do... (like certain parts not to be touched)

anyways... it's more or less solved my problem... i still get the same FontStruct error in the shell and the pop up menu descriptions are still rectangles but at least characters are readable...

regards and thanks to all..
cheers,

/Andra

weird thing... today it decided to not work again... :S

I'm having a similar problem. while I agree that it may be a debian problem, none of the following worked, emacs still complains about the same fonts:

Starting emacs with -font fixed argument works and modifying the fonts on the options->mule menu also does, but if I save the modifications, next time I run emacs, it dies with segmentation fault (well, at least this is emacs fault).
I am replacing emacs link on my path by a script that calls it with -font fixed option. The script is following.

emacs -font tixed $@

This will not fix the problem, but will make emacs work.