bkline
December 17th, 2011, 02:27 PM
I just installed a fresh Xubuntu on my laptop, and I have run into a problem that has me puzzled. When I connect to the servers of one of my customers with this laptop and try to run emacs I get the following error message:
Warning: Cannot convert string "-*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*" to type FontStruct
Warning: Cannot convert string "-*-helvetica-medium-r-*--*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1" to type FontStruct
When the emacs window comes up all of the characters are represented by square boxes instead of recognizable character glyphs.
Let me start by acknowledging that my understanding of X Windows, and in particular fonts under X Windows, is pretty thin. From a little Wikipedia reading, I get the picture that although the design of X Windows allows the rendering of fonts to happen on either the X client or the X server, "The use of server-side fonts is currently considered deprecated in favour of client-side fonts." [1] So I would think that the problem is on my customer's servers, not my laptop. But here's the puzzling part: I don't have this problem using emacs on those servers from any other machine, including X in Cygwin on Windows machines. And I can use emacs without this problem when connected to my own servers (running Debian). (The customer's servers are RHEL 5.5 boxes.)
Any X Windows gurus out there who can tell me where to start looking to track down and solve this problem? Is it possible that in spite of what I've quoted above from Wikipedia (about the X client handling the font rendering) that it's the X server on my laptop which is missing something (this is the only machine on which I've installed xfce without already having gnome in place). If so, why wouldn't I run into the problem when connected to my Debian servers?
Thanks for any enlightenment you can shed!
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Font_Server
Warning: Cannot convert string "-*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*" to type FontStruct
Warning: Cannot convert string "-*-helvetica-medium-r-*--*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1" to type FontStruct
When the emacs window comes up all of the characters are represented by square boxes instead of recognizable character glyphs.
Let me start by acknowledging that my understanding of X Windows, and in particular fonts under X Windows, is pretty thin. From a little Wikipedia reading, I get the picture that although the design of X Windows allows the rendering of fonts to happen on either the X client or the X server, "The use of server-side fonts is currently considered deprecated in favour of client-side fonts." [1] So I would think that the problem is on my customer's servers, not my laptop. But here's the puzzling part: I don't have this problem using emacs on those servers from any other machine, including X in Cygwin on Windows machines. And I can use emacs without this problem when connected to my own servers (running Debian). (The customer's servers are RHEL 5.5 boxes.)
Any X Windows gurus out there who can tell me where to start looking to track down and solve this problem? Is it possible that in spite of what I've quoted above from Wikipedia (about the X client handling the font rendering) that it's the X server on my laptop which is missing something (this is the only machine on which I've installed xfce without already having gnome in place). If so, why wouldn't I run into the problem when connected to my Debian servers?
Thanks for any enlightenment you can shed!
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Font_Server