Arch Linux

wlen

Member

Registered: 2014-06-20

Posts: 6

[SOLVED] Font render/refresh fail after upgrade

After upgrading last Thursday some applications have trouble rendering or refreshing text.

LibreOffice

Claws-Mail

In claws-mail, I do see some of the text re-appear after scrolling. For LibreOffice the problem only manifests itself in the menu bar, not in the document contents.
I don't think it's related to the OpenJDK bug mentioned on this board since claws-mail doesn't depend on OpenJDK.

Can anyone give pointers on where to investigate the cause of this problem?

Update: problem seems xrandr/dual-screen related, see my later comment.
Final update: xf86-video-intel was the culprit, see my steps for downgrading.

Last edited by wlen (2014-06-23 12:29:43)

ooo

Member

Registered: 2013-04-10

Posts: 1,638

Re: [SOLVED] Font render/refresh fail after upgrade

running

fc-cache -frv

would be one thing to try

do you have issues with every application or just some?

wlen

Member

Registered: 2014-06-20

Posts: 6

Re: [SOLVED] Font render/refresh fail after upgrade

running

fc-cache -frv

would be one thing to try

do you have issues with every application or just some?

Just ran that command as the normal user and as root, restarted the X server, but no difference.

So far I've encountered the issue with LibreOffice and Claws-mail. No problems with Inkscape, Gimp, Firefox.

brebs

Member

Registered: 2007-04-03

Posts: 3,742

Re: [SOLVED] Font render/refresh fail after upgrade

What you just did was wrong. Correct order is:

1. Quit xorg (don't want xorg apps trying to access the fontconfig cache, while the cache is being regenerated)
2. Run as root:  fc-cache -rf
3. Restart xorg

Run claws-mail from the commandline, look for warning messages.

wlen

Member

Registered: 2014-06-20

Posts: 6

Re: [SOLVED] Font render/refresh fail after upgrade

What you just did was wrong. Correct order is:

1. Quit xorg (don't want xorg apps trying to access the fontconfig cache, while the cache is being regenerated)
2. Run as root:  fc-cache -rf
3. Restart xorg

Run claws-mail from the commandline, look for warning messages.

Tried this, but to no avail. I did notice fc-cache gives me two errors:

/usr/share/fonts: error scanning
/usr/share/fonts/encodings: error scanning

brebs

Member

Registered: 2007-04-03

Posts: 3,742

Re: [SOLVED] Font render/refresh fail after upgrade

I've never seen that error before. I suggest you use bohoomil's packages, including his patched fontconfig.

wlen

Member

Registered: 2014-06-20

Posts: 6

Re: [SOLVED] Font render/refresh fail after upgrade

Thanks for the suggestion, but there wasn't anything wrong with my font configuration before the upgrade; I'd like to restore it to it's working condition, not replace it with something else.

I managed to narrow down the cause of this problem; the problem only manifests itself when I use xrandr for my dual screen setup:

.xinitrc:

...
xrandr --output VGA1 --auto --output LVDS1 --right-of VGA1
...

When I remove the xrandr line, the problem disappears. When I run the xrandr command by hand, the problem comes back, on both screens. When I run xrandr to change to a single screen setup, the problem disappears again.

Does anyone have any idea where to look for a solution?

wlen

Member

Registered: 2014-06-20

Posts: 6

Re: [SOLVED] Font render/refresh fail after upgrade

Hooray, managed to find the cause.

Looked through all the packages that were upgraded on that day, you can find these in: /var/log/pacman.log

Then proceeded to downgrade all the packages related to video/fonts things that I recognised; 'intel-dri', all the '*mesa*' packages, 'wxgtk' and 'xf86-video-intel'. Tested after every downgrade, and it turned out only 'xf86-video-intel' caused the font render bug.

The upgrade in the log:

/var/log/pacman.log

[2014-06-18 02:21] [PACMAN] upgraded xf86-video-intel (2.99.911-2 -> 2.99.912-1)

The downgrade:

wget http://seblu.net/a/arm/packages/x/xf86-video-intel/xf86-video-intel-2.99.911-2-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz
sudo pacman -U xf86-video-intel-2.99.911-2-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz

wlen

Member

Registered: 2014-06-20

Posts: 6

Re: [SOLVED] Font render/refresh fail after upgrade

Filed a bug report: https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/40949