Arch Linux

lemonjuice

Member

Registered: 2016-08-31

Posts: 2

[SOLVED] Text showing as symbols

I installed arch about a week ago and have had no problems, but one thing has cropped up which has been very annoying. In the taskbar in i3 and some paragraphs on web pages, I get a bunch of symbols instead of the proper alphabet.

http://imgur.com/a/SY8HT

It hasn't always been like this, the problem only occured today. Is there any way I can fix this?
edit: [SOLVED]

Last edited by lemonjuice (2016-09-01 09:26:35)

Vison

Member

Registered: 2016-08-21

Posts: 8

Re: [SOLVED] Text showing as symbols

I believe that means you're missing some fonts. Somewhere under the general recommendations part of the wiki it suggests installing ttf-dejavu fonts (I've made sure I've done this on all of my installs so far). You might try that as well as any other font packages you think you might be missing.

Edit: Are you using a configuration for i3 you didn't make? Maybe it's trying to call fonts you don't have. you might have to scour some of the config files to find out if my original suggestion doesn't resolve it.

Last edited by Vison (2016-09-01 05:01:36)

Head_on_a_Stick

Member

From: London

Registered: 2014-02-20

Posts: 7,732

Website

Re: [SOLVED] Text showing as symbols

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=216418

---

Are you infected with Wetiko?

lemonjuice

Member

Registered: 2016-08-31

Posts: 2

Re: [SOLVED] Text showing as symbols

Thank you. I installed ttf-dejavu fonts via pacman and now Firefox is showing a monospace font where required.

sudo pacman -S ttf-dejavu

--
I will also post what I did for i3 if anyone else needs to sort this out in the future. The config is at /etc/i3/config and I was using the pre-generated one. Comment out

font pango:monospace 8

which is near the start of the file, and a few lines below that there is a commented line which reads:

#font pango:DejaVu Sans Mono 8

Uncomment this, and the system font for i3 will change to a monospace font at reboot (which I myself like). Of course if you would like a different font it should work if you enter another font you have installed, although I haven't tried that yet.

Edit: solved
[SOLVED]

Last edited by lemonjuice (2016-09-01 09:25:22)