I was helping out a friend with her Linux setup. She's using Slackware 9. When she attempts to read foriegn language webpages using firefox, the characters are showing up as boxes with hexadecimal numbers in them. We tried other browsers. Same problem.

I tried the same thing on the machine I have at home running Xandros 3.02 OC and it works fine.

1. Is this a font problem, do I need to install additional fonts?

2. Some googling indicate that Slackware does not often come with international support or that it is not a default option during install. The post I read seems to be instructions on installing KDE fonts, but I don't think firefox is a KDE app?

Paul

Firefox is not a KDE app.

I had a very similar problem where I was unable to view some mathematical characters. What I did was copied all of the TrueType fonts [*.ttf] from a Windows installation and copied them into a fonts directory. Then I switced to those fonts only, which have a much larger character set is my best guess, and haven't had the problem since.

I think there are some other solutions, but this was simple and worked for me.

What's the definitive solution to this everyone? I've been wondering myself. I've always had this problem with Slackware but since I started rolling my own, I've had full support for just about every language under the sun. Gucharmap actually works now too. KDE never touches my system either so support has to be in a base package set, not in the form of il8n packages...

Do you have all X fonts installed? I have them all and there isn't any problem viewing even chinese fonts. I'm using opera but firefox I think also works ok.

Yes, the fonts were the cause of the problem. I copy all of the truetype fonts in my windows XP to the Linux box and reboot the machine. Suddenly, it all works fine. I wonder if there is an alternative though. Not everyone will have a windows machine to copy the fonts from.

Once you've copied the ttf's from a Windows box to a directory - I am assuming it would be /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF/ - you'd have to run mkfontdir, wouldn't you? Or, is there some other tool that is needed to get the fonts registered and available to the system?

In previous release, you would have to do a mkfontdir and restart X.

On Slackware 10.2, I did need to run mkfontdir since it worked right after I copy the font files to /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF/ and rebooted the machine. I assumed that Slackware now does it automatically during startup.

Paul

A restart wasn't necessary. Well, not of the machine at least. I did need to restart X.

I copied all the ttf files I could find on my Win2K box and copied them to /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF/. Then I ran mkfontdir in the directory. When I restarted X, the fonts were there.

One thing I noticed about mkfontdir, though. It doesn't understand the flag -h or --help. If you use mkfontdir --help, it just runs normally as if you had just simply called it. Turned out to be OK, but it surprised me nonetheless. I had expected a short list of its possible options.

A lot of X server related applications behave this strange way. So I'm using info app or man app.

Yeah, I had taken a look at the man page, but when it came to entering the command, I couldn't remember if I needed one of the options or not. I entered the command `mkfontdir --help` and was surprised when it just returned me back to the command prompt. I checked the modification date for fonts.dir in that directory and saw that it had just been changed.

Personally, I prefer `man app`. I have never really gotten the hang of navigating in `info app`, although I have to admit it really isn't that hard. And as far as I am concerned, there are times when `man -t app | lp` just can't be beat. (I check the length first though. )