emacs fonts not found

[jyoung]

Hi Folks,

I'm working on a recently installed gentoo system, and I'm having trouble with fonts in emacs. The default font loads fine, but when I try to increase the font size or change fonts, emacs either doesn't respond or turns the characters into the rectangles that are displayed when a font can't be found.

There are lots of posts about similar problems, but I've tried the solutions and none seems to work. A common answer is to re-emerge emacs with new use flags. Here are some USE flag combinations that I've tried:

athena Xaw3d -gtk xft
xft
gtk gsettings gconf xft

Despite the range, the effect is always the same. Does anyone have any clue what might be going on? Thanks!

[jyoung]

I'm not sure if this is related, but I also get this warning on the terminal when my mouse passes over the emacs windows:

Gtk-CRITICAL **: 15:26:16.332: gtk_distribute_natural_allocation: assertion 'extra_space >= 0' failed

[mike155]

Hi jyoung,

I'm not an Emacs expert. But I tried to reproduce the problem you reported.

1. I emerged Emacs with USE flag 'xft'. To be precise, I built Emacs with the USE flags below:
   

   Code:

   X acl alsa gpm inotify jpeg lcms png ssl svg systemd threads tiff xft xpm zlib -Xaw3d -aqua -athena -cairo -dbus -dynamic-loading -games -gconf -gfile -gif -gsettings -gtk -gtk2 -gzip-el -imagemagick -kerberos -libxml2 -livecd -m17n-lib -mailutils -motif -selinux -sound -source -toolkit-scroll-bars -wide-int -xwidgets

   
   
2. I started Emacs with
   

   Code:

   emacs -fn 'Noto Sans'

   
   
3. I increased and decreased the font size using C-x C-+ and C-x C-
   

On my machine, everything works as expected. Is that the scenario where you have problems? If not: please describe eactly how I can reproduce the problems you reported.

Mike

[jyoung]

mike155,

I recompiled emacs with exactly those flags, and when I tried to launch it with that command it returned:
Font ‘Noto Sans’ is not defined

and then failed to launch. This really speaks to some missing font library.

[mike155]

[jyoung]

I will confess some ignorance of system fonts and such. On my previous gentoo machine, emacs was able to find the necessary fonts without twiddling anything. How do I determine this?

[mike155]

It could well be that you configured your machine in a way that emacs uses a bitmapped font. In that case it's no wonder that scaling up/down doesn't work. It could also be that your emacs uses a scalable font and that something else is wrong.

But I cannot look into your system. If you want me to help you, you should make sure that your emacs uses a scalable TTF or OTF font. And you should tell me the font your emacs uses. Otherwise I cannot help you.

[jyoung]

In emacs, under the Fontset menu, I see:
startup: 13-dot-medium
standard: 16-dot medium

and under the Misc menu I see:
lucidsanstypewriter
lucidsanstypewriter-bold
sony
clean
fixed
default

But selecting these has no effect on the actual font rendered. These are just internal emacs labels for system fonts, though, yes?

As for the fonts installed on my system, I ran

[mike155]

It seems that you have "Stix 2" fonts installed.

Please run

[jyoung]

Okay, trying that I get:

Font ‘STIX Two Text’ is not defined

It sounds like I have this font installed but emacs isn't connecting to it. Currently my emacs is installed with the same use flags as yours.

[mike155]

Let's try to find out what is wrong.

1) What is the output of:

[jyoung]

1)

[mike155]

jyoung: I'm afraid I can't help you. I tried to reproduce the problems you posted (boxes instead of characters and "emacs -fn 'STIX Two Text'" won't start), but no matter what I do, I cannot reproduce this problem.

Just a few random thoughts:

• Did you install or configure infinality?
  
  
• Create a new user and start emacs from this user. Do you still see the problems you reported?
  
  
• When you run "emerge emacs", you will see some status messages from configure. Look at the two messages below:
  

  Code:

  Does Emacs use -lfreetype?         yes   Does Emacs use -lxft?              yes

  
  Do you see 'yes' on both lines on your machine? If you see "no" on one of the lines, emacs won't be able to display Truetype fonts.
  
  
• Do you really need emacs? If you just chose emacs because you needed an editor, you could try a more modern editor like 'kate'.
  

[jyoung]

infinality is not installed on my system. The only package on my system that has the infinality use flag is media-libs/freetype, and it's turned off.

I created a new user, and the emacs had the same issue. I also have gentoo installed on another machine at work, and the problem exists there too. The system is setup similarly, but not exactly the same. And, weirdly, emacs worked fine for over a year until a recent update (emerge --update --deep --newuse world).

Yes, I see both of those messages when I emerge emacs.

This looks like a very strange problem!

[jyoung]

mike155, what desktop are you running? The is a longshot, but maybe that has something to do with it. I'm running xfce.

[mike155]

I run KDE. In case of problems, I switch to weston or twm.

You could try twm - it's tiny and easy to install. Install packages 'twm' and 'xterm'. Write 'exec twm' to your .xinitrc. Start twm with 'startx' from a Linux text console. You will get a black screen. If you press the left mouse key, you will get a menu. Select 'xterm'. In the xterm window, enter 'emacs' to start Emacs. Press Alt-Ctrl-Backspace to return to your text console.

[dpaddy]

Sorry if I'm contributing noise... I run fluxbox and the following seem to work for me

[jyoung]

Trying twm produced a strange result. I've actually used twm before on other machines, but not on this one. But, it wouldn't even start. Here's the output of startx:

[mike155]

[jyoung]

I've installed those fonts, and now twm launches. Within twm, emacs works fine. I'm able to change fonts and font sizes. Could the problem be related to xfce?

[jyoung]

Actually, emacs now behaves in xfce too. It looks like installing the fonts that twm complained about did the trick. Does anyone have any idea why those particular fonts are critical, and if they're critical why they might not have been pulled in by emerge?