Re: font/character problems using gnome 2.8.1 on AIX 5.2

[Sid Kode <sidkode us ibm com>]

Yeah, GNOME searches if you have any
fonts installed in ~/.fonts, /usr/share/fonts (and some other locations)
in that order.  I did not have a ~/.fonts and the main fonts dir on
AIX is different - its not on the list GNOME searches.  So I was able
to resolve the problem by installing some fonts in my ~/.fonts and ran
"fc-cache ~/.fonts".  The gnome-admin page was a huge help:
http://www.gnome.org/learn/admin-guide/2.6/system-admin-guide.html
To answer your q, AIX uses an internal
X server - this is probably one of the reasons for the different standard
font paths.  But pango seems to work w/ it too - I guess Bull (or
whoever) did a nice job of porting it along with all of the other GNOME
components.  Everything works fine now.

Thanks for the info,
Sid.


On Tue, 2005-08-02 at 23:32 -0700, Sid Kode wrote:
> 
> I installed all the aix binary rpms on the gnome page of
> http://www.bullfreeware.com.  Everything seems to work fine besides
> the fonts...  I have attached a screenshot of my desktop.  Note
that
> the xv dialog font shows up correctly.  Anyone know what the
cause
> might be? 
> 
> Sid. 
> 

Just some information: GTK+ uses unicode for its text (which I think is
standard on all unices), but the actual font rendering is done via a
library called Pango, which AFAIK relies heavily on Fontconfig2 and and
xtf/FreeType for font rendering.

Are you using X.org's server or an internal aix one? X.org one will just
work wrt Pango, but I have no clue about aix.

I think this might be an aix related problem.

Cheers,
Ryan