font failure in Emacs

[bkline]

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

[bkline]

Well, in spite of that line from Wikipedia I quoted in the previous message, it looks like it's the X server (that is, my laptop) which renders the fonts (at least in Xubuntu). After further digging, I came up with a solution which involved creating the file ~/.Xdefaults with the line

emacs*font: 7x14

and then running

xrdb -merge ~/.Xdefaults

. Problem gone!

So I guess Xubuntu/xfce leaves out fonts that the rest of the world assumes will be there. Hope this is useful to someone else who might run into the same problem.

[screaqy]

Brilliant!!! I'm new to Ubuntu and I've been looking for the solution for a long time and it's now solved! Thanks!!!

[bkline]

I'm amused at how my brain works (or doesn't) as I get older. So yesterday I had a hardware failure and I needed to rebuild my workstation. Didn't take too long, and I get back to work and notice that as I start editing source code I've got nothing but square blocks in emacs. So I start googling and what do I find but my own post. Apply my own solution and I'm back on the road. A couple of minutes later screaqy's message hits my inbox. Gotta love the internet (and this forum)!

@screaqy: glad it helped you, too.

[johnsg]

Thanks for the fix - worked perfectly for me after a fresh install of emacs on 12.04!

[econrad]

Thanks this worked for me too!

[mguycooper]

Wow thanks a bunch, this worked for me as well.

[mguycooper]

Hi,

This works for me but everytime I close down Ubuntu and then reopen I have to use the command -xrdb -merge ~/.Xdefaults over again. Does the .Xdefaults file have to be in a particular directory?

[mguycooper]

bump^

Anyone know how I can avoid having to type 'xrdb -merge ~/.XDefaults' every time I reboot?

[mguycooper]

Nevermind! I think i just needed to add a new line to the end of the .Xdefaults file. Thanks again for the great solution!