This has been driving me mad for a couple of days.

In some applications I end up with all the text for the File/Edit/View etc tabs & anything else that should be text on buttons etc.

I end up with something similar to "�", but without anything inside it, just the square itself. It looks like one square for each letter.

If I look at KCharSelect, all the fonts installed look fine, however if I open Character Map, everything apart from the window tab saying "Character Map" is a square block.

Can anybody give any suggestions on what the problem is, or what I need to do to try and identify what might be causing the problem.

A typical example of where the problem arises is using Thunderbird 1.5.05 and I try to import an Address book using Tools, Import. I get the "This wizard will import mail messages" window coming up with the option to impoirt Address books etc. If I click Next and then Next for Text file (LDIF etc) the next window that comes up is just the squares for all text.

I'm using Slackware 10.2, KDE 3.5.4.

Its not the only application I have this problem with, I get the same using NVIDIA X-Server settings.

Any suggestions will be gratefully received.

I'm not sure what config/info files I'd need to look at to even get an idea of whats wrong, so if there's anything I should look at & copy here that'd help, let me know.

Thanks in advance.

I see you're using KDE 3.5.4 on Slackware 10.2 ! Are you sure you've got the upgrade right ? Cause few packages wore split lately, for example in the KDE area fontconfig was cut out of kdebase or kdelibs (where ever it was before)... so you better double check the Changelog and your packages and make sure they are in order.

Thanks for that suggestion, I'll have a look at it when I get home tonight.

The KDE upgrade seemed to go ok, from what I can remember, it'd worked with no problems. It only seemed to arise after I tried to install Pango and some depedencies for another package. I'll probably end up looking at what I'd installed/updated at that point and maybe reinstalling the original versions from the Slackware repository.

I think I did have problems with kdelibs, so maybe that needs looking at in more detail.

I've not had any luck solving this, I've reinstalled a couple of packages, downgraded them back to Slackware 10.2 (Pango, Cairo etc which I was installing when the problem arose).

I've just noted that while I'm using a different computer today (Windows XP based) that the "�" character that was being used for all characters (on the problem app's) is a clean square on this machine, on my own laptop, when I view this thread, the square has got text within the border of the square.

Within the applications I had problems with, I was seeing a clean square.

Because I'm using a Windows XP machine today, I wondered whether the problem could be a Unicode coversion problem and if thats a possibility, is there anything I can do to check this and fix if necessary?

Thanks

I am seeing a similar problem. a clean square appears where there should be characters. It affects all characters in applications that rely on Pango and Cairo. I first noticed it with Firefox, but only with the dialog box that prompts for a download "save as" location. Azureus is completely affected. No characters appear, only clean, empty squares, as if place-holders for actual fonts. When I launch Azureus from a terminal, I get this error:

I have tried re-installing: Pango, Cairo, fontconfig, and kdebase because of suggestions I have read about in this and other threads. All to no avail. If anyone has a solution, your help would be greatly appreciated.

Hi

Nothing I tried was able to solve this problem.

I could have carried on with it, but as it was my first proper installation of Slackware & I'd got a few thing wrong in other places, I decided to reinstall from the CD's.

Initially, I did a reinstall over my original setup (only formatting my boot directory, leaving the otehr partions as they where (/opt /home etc) but the problem was still there.

Eventually, I reformatted the drives and did a complete clean install.

Sorry I can't offer anymore hope than a potential reinstall, but good luck finding a solution.