[SOLVED] Wingdings/Symbol/etc font issue

Tuxqi · 05-25-2019, 08:07 AM

I am having issues with glyph type fonts such as Wingdings (1, 2 and 3), Symbol, Webdings and possibly others.

Most programs just don't seem to display them properly or at all.

I normally wouldn't really care as I rarely use them but I was playing an old Windows game via WINE and some of the stuff in there uses wingdings and symbol fonts. I thought it might have been just a WINE issue and copied the fonts over to the fake C drive. That didn't help.

So I looked into my system fonts more.

If I try using wingdings or symbol in LibreOffice, any character typed just appears as normal latin character (Although the preview text works fine). The same behaviour happens with GIMP

If I try the fonts in Kolorpaint then Symbol does work but Wingdings just types the unknown character square boxes.

If I view all my fonts in KDE's 'Font Management' the standard preview for those fonts shows blank characters for Wingdings and boxes for Symbol. If I tell it to show all characters it displays them.

If I just view the fonts individually with just 'KFontview' then both previews work fine for all the fonts.

I'm guessing something somewhere is causing a conflict and I have no idea what.

Only things I have really tried is removing them and reinstalling different versions

Didier Spaier · 05-25-2019, 09:16 AM

You need to use an unicode font that includes glyphs for these characters. Not all do.

Tuxqi · 05-25-2019, 09:19 AM

I think you have misunderstood the problem.

The problem is the fonts do not seem to be functioning properly.

Typing ABC in wingdings for example, should just type the glyphs that have the ASCII/UTF etc values of ABC.

phenixia2003 · 05-26-2019, 04:00 AM

Hello,

If you encounter this under slackware 14.2, this is because of this bug in fontconfig which was fixed in fontconfig 2.11.93 (14.2 comes with 2.11.1). since -current comes with fontconfig 2.13.1, it is not affected.

Edit: You can fix this with this patch. To apply it you need to proceed as below :

1. Download fontconfig source and the patch :

Code:

$ lftp -c "open http://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware64-14.2/source/x/ ; mirror fontconfig/"

$ cd fontconfig

$ wget https://github.com/freedesktop/fontconfig/commit/d6d5adeb7940c0d0beb86489c2a1c2ce59e5c044.patch

2. in directory fontconfig, open fontconfig.SlackBuild, then, at line 82, add the following statement :

Code:

patch -p1<${CWD}/d6d5adeb7940c0d0beb86489c2a1c2ce59e5c044.patch

3. as root, go in directory fontconfig, then execute the following :

Code:

$ . /etc/profile.d/tetex.sh
$ BUILD=3 sh fontconfig.SlackBuild
$ upgradepkg /tmp/fontconfig-2.11.1-x86_64-3.txz

Note: it is required to 'source' /etc/profile.d/tetex.sh otherwise fontconfig fails to build with an error about pdfjadetex.

4. Done.

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SeB

Tuxqi · 05-26-2019, 04:41 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by phenixia2003

Hello,

If you encounter this under slackware 14.2, this is because of this bug in fontconfig which was fixed in fontconfig 2.11.93 (14.2 comes with 2.11.1). since -current comes with fontconfig 2.13.1, it is not affected.

--
SeB

I see. Do you know if its safe to compile/upgrade the package manually or will it break stuff?

phenixia2003 · 05-26-2019, 04:56 AM

Hello,

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tuxqi

I see. Do you know if its safe to compile/upgrade the package manually or will it break stuff?

I edited my previous message with instructions about that. I tried it on a VM and didn't encounter any issue. However, in case you have trouble, you could anyway reinstall the original fontconfig package.

--
SeB

olear · 05-26-2019, 09:01 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by phenixia2003

Hello,

If you encounter this under slackware 14.2, this is because of this bug in fontconfig which was fixed in fontconfig 2.11.93 (14.2 comes with 2.11.1). since -current comes with fontconfig 2.13.1, it is not affected.

Why have not this been fixed in 14.2? (the patch is simple).

Tuxqi · 05-26-2019, 06:09 PM

Well I instead ran the slackbuild in source to compile 2.11.95 and it does seem to have fixed the problem. Also made a compat32 version to upgrade that.

GIMP, Kolourpaint and Firefox all seem to be working fine with those fonts.

However LibreOffice still doesn't seem to work with them. I can only assume it's either using some cache somewhere or it has to be built with the patched/upgraded version of fontconfig. However I don't need to use those fonts in that program so not a big deal for me.