Massive font breakage on all my Arch machines (and my NixOS machine?!)

soundtoxin · 2017-02-12 18:59:23

So this problem seemingly came out of nowhere some months ago. I'll do my best to give all the info I have so far. First of all, multiple fonts are affected, but not all fonts. The affected ones are at the very least Tewi, Terminus, Lemon. These are all some monospace fonts I like that I had used in the past, so when one broke I tried the others. Currently I've had to fallback to Tamzen, which looks okay I guess but it's not ideal. So, Tamzen displays totally fine, but the rest look extremely broken. The broken fonts are also not visible in lxappearance, however their packages are installed, and the relevant font files are in the right folder still. I'm use Termite for my terminal emulator, although this issue extends beyond it of course.

https://i.imgur.com/kSFGTKf.png

Here is an image of what screenfetch looks like using any of the three broken fonts, although for the record I had specifically set Terminus for this.

https://i.imgur.com/eumqGMn.png

Now here is an image of screenfetch running using the Tamzen font. This font works for some reason. You should notice that the weird spacing issues of the first image are not present here.

I hope someone can help me figure this out. Clearly something besides the fonts themselves has broken, and it's something I must be running on all my machines. I have asked two friends that use Arch to try these fonts and apparently they work for them, although neither supplied proof in the form of images, unfortunately. If you need any more info, please just ask. This is a very upsetting situation for me.

Mod note: replaced oversized embedded images with URLs. Please read the community code of conduct regarding acceptable image sizes. -- WorMzy

Last edited by WorMzy (2017-02-12 19:30:24)

c00ter · 2017-02-12 19:21:35

I don't suppose this has anything to do with the infinality fonts problem of recent weeks?

Regards

jasonwryan · 2017-02-12 19:39:08

What has changed? What did you update? Or did this just happen spontaneously?

Please read How To Ask Questions The Smart Way and include some relevant information, error messages, etc.

Moving to NC

soundtoxin · 2017-02-12 20:11:52

Infinality is not involved. Never used it. Also, I believe it was a spontaneous issue. At the time I was trying to setup polybar (previously know as lemonbuddy) and I noticed the fonts in the bar were not showing up as the ones configured. I did all sorts of messing around at this point with different fonts and whatnot, and running fc-cache over and over. It's hard to know what the actual cause of the issue was because I typically keep open several terminals and use tmux, so basically it wasn't until I opened a new terminal that I saw how broken the font had become. Anything already open displayed fine, so this issue was probably going on since before trying to setup polybar even.

I believe what's happening is that for some reason these fonts aren't actually being selected properly at all, and that in addition to this, whatever my fallback font is also happens to look broken for some reason.

edit: There aren't any errors I've seen anywhere, but if anyone knows where I could find logs relevant to fonts that I could paste parts of, I would be happy to do so.

Last edited by soundtoxin (2017-02-12 20:17:25)

jasonwryan · 2017-02-12 20:18:14

soundtoxin wrote:

I believe it was a spontaneous issue.

That is not possible.

Read your shell history and see what you broke.

soundtoxin · 2017-02-12 20:22:48

Not possible? I guess you just baited me then. Oh well. As I said in the first post, this was months ago, and I believe it was caused due to an update of a package, not something I did, so viewing my shell history isn't going to be much help. This also happens on NixOS after upgrading to the unstable channel without any other configuration, so I think it's an upstream issue with a font-related package. I don't know exactly what it could be yet. That's why I'm hoping some people can help me figure it out.

edit: I see you asked further up "what I updated". I am simply referring to the usual pacman -Syu, and I have a lot of packages. This combined with the issue happening at an unknown time far into the past makes it hard to track down.

Last edited by soundtoxin (2017-02-12 20:27:37)

jasonwryan · 2017-02-12 20:37:32

Work your way through the font configuration page on the wiki. Starting from scratch seems the most logical approach at this point.

soundtoxin · 2017-02-12 20:46:27

Thanks for the tip. I guess I will post back with things I've tried and results from then in a while. I was also told to try creating a new user in case it was a config issue.

jasonwryan · 2017-02-12 20:53:05

One other thing to check: the name of Terminus changed a while back (upstream issue), I don't know if they have reverted yet (or if they plan to).

There are threads here about it.

seth · 2017-02-13 12:33:06

This is urxvt and there's no equivalent issue with xterm?

soundtoxin · 2017-02-13 22:27:11

Creating a new user did not fix the issue. This rules out a config issue, I guess.

seth wrote:

This is urxvt and there's no equivalent issue with xterm?

I'm using Termite and I found that xterm has the issue as well, although it doesn't look exactly the same. lxappearance not showing the problem fonts anymore is another sign that it is unrelated to the fonts themselves or the terminal emulator I'm using.

jasonwryan wrote:

One other thing to check: the name of Terminus changed a while back (upstream issue), I don't know if they have reverted yet (or if they plan to).
There are threads here about it.

The issue originally happened while I was using Tewi and it also occurs with Lemon, so I think it's safe to say that Terminus having a name change is completely unrelated.

Last edited by soundtoxin (2017-02-13 22:29:03)

seth · 2017-02-14 13:30:42

Ok, sorry (you actually mentioned it)
Check "fc-match Terminus" and cc. since Termite is gtk3: are you on gnome? On wayland?

soundtoxin · 2017-02-14 20:19:55

➜  ~ fc-match Terminus
DejaVuSans.ttf: "DejaVu Sans" "Book"
➜  ~ fc-match Tewi
DejaVuSans.ttf: "DejaVu Sans" "Book"
➜  ~ fc-match Lemon
DejaVuSans.ttf: "DejaVu Sans" "Book"
➜  ~ fc-match tewi
DejaVuSans.ttf: "DejaVu Sans" "Book"
➜  ~ fc-match terminus
DejaVuSans.ttf: "DejaVu Sans" "Book"

I think we're getting somewhere now! So I guess these fonts are just not working at all and I am seeing this fallback font. That explains why no matter which of the three broken fonts I use, they look the same. What can I do about this?

I am not on Gnome or Wayland. I'm using i3wm and xorg.

Last edited by soundtoxin (2017-02-14 20:20:16)

loqs · 2017-02-14 20:38:07

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 7#p1681427
See also https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/52502#comment154348

Last edited by loqs (2017-02-14 20:40:27)

seth · 2017-02-14 20:39:00

fc-list | grep -i lemon
sudo fc-cache -rv # watch the output
fc-match terminus

And yes: most terminal emulators cannot deal with variable width fonts.

soundtoxin · 2017-02-14 20:57:32

loqs wrote:

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 7#p1681427
See also https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/52502#comment154348

I'm a bit concerned that my mentioning of Terminus has brought this a bit off the rails. I was using Tewi when I experienced breakage, it just wasn't the only font to break. I'm not sure what two word name I would use for Tewi, or why Tamzen works when these other three don't. Also, why do these installed fonts not show up in lxappearance?

Also, Termite does not use .Xresources. So what change am I supposed to make?

loqs · 2017-02-14 21:03:46

soundtoxin wrote:

I'm a bit concerned that my mentioning of Terminus has brought this a bit off the rails. I was using Tewi when I experienced breakage, it just wasn't the only font to break.

As the first link I posted notes the change of names is for all pcf fonts.

soundtoxin wrote:

I'm not sure what two word name I would use for Tewi, or why Tamzen works when these other three don't.

As seth already indicated find the fonts new name from `fc-list`
Edit:

soundtoxin wrote:

Also, Termite does not use .Xresources. So what change am I supposed to make?

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Termite#Font

Last edited by loqs (2017-02-14 21:07:24)

soundtoxin · 2017-02-14 21:04:20

seth wrote:

fc-list | grep -i lemon
sudo fc-cache -rv # watch the output
fc-match terminus
And yes: most terminal emulators cannot deal with variable width fonts.

➜  ~ fc-list | grep -i lemon   
/usr/share/fonts/misc/lemon.pcf: artwiz lemon:style=Regular
/usr/share/fonts/misc/lemon-j.pcf: artwiz lemon:style=Regular
/usr/share/fonts/misc/lemon-ISO8859-1.pcf: artwiz lemon:style=Regular
/usr/share/fonts/misc/lemon-j-ISO8859-1.pcf: artwiz lemon:style=Regular
➜  ~ sudo fc-cache -rv
[sudo] password for soundtoxin:
/usr/share/fonts: caching, new cache contents: 0 fonts, 12 dirs
/usr/share/fonts/100dpi: caching, new cache contents: 0 fonts, 0 dirs
/usr/share/fonts/75dpi: caching, new cache contents: 0 fonts, 0 dirs
/usr/share/fonts/OTF: caching, new cache contents: 62 fonts, 0 dirs
/usr/share/fonts/TTF: caching, new cache contents: 66 fonts, 0 dirs
/usr/share/fonts/Type1: caching, new cache contents: 0 fonts, 0 dirs
/usr/share/fonts/cantarell: caching, new cache contents: 4 fonts, 0 dirs
/usr/share/fonts/cyrillic: caching, new cache contents: 0 fonts, 0 dirs
/usr/share/fonts/encodings: caching, new cache contents: 0 fonts, 1 dirs
/usr/share/fonts/encodings/large: caching, new cache contents: 0 fonts, 0 dirs
/usr/share/fonts/local: caching, new cache contents: 35 fonts, 0 dirs
/usr/share/fonts/misc: caching, new cache contents: 113 fonts, 0 dirs
/usr/share/fonts/steam-fonts: caching, new cache contents: 9 fonts, 0 dirs
/usr/share/fonts/util: caching, new cache contents: 0 fonts, 0 dirs
/root/.local/share/fonts: skipping, no such directory
/root/.fonts: skipping, no such directory
/var/cache/fontconfig: cleaning cache directory
/root/.cache/fontconfig: not cleaning non-existent cache directory
/root/.fontconfig: not cleaning non-existent cache directory
fc-cache: succeeded
➜  ~ fc-match terminus
DejaVuSans.ttf: "DejaVu Sans" "Book"

Looks like

fc-cache -rv

didn't do much.

seth · 2017-02-14 21:07:28

fc-match "artwiz lemon"
fc-match "xos4 terminus"

No idea how to configure termite, though. Sorry.

Edit, or alias fonts:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
  <match target="pattern">
    <test qual="any" name="family"><string>xos4 Terminus</string></test>
    <edit name="family" mode="assign" binding="same"><string>Terminus</string></edit>
  </match>
</fontconfig>

Last edited by seth (2017-02-14 21:09:39)

soundtoxin · 2017-02-14 21:08:34

loqs wrote:

soundtoxin wrote:
I'm a bit concerned that my mentioning of Terminus has brought this a bit off the rails. I was using Tewi when I experienced breakage, it just wasn't the only font to break.
As the first link I posted notes the change of names is for all pcf fonts.
soundtoxin wrote:
I'm not sure what two word name I would use for Tewi, or why Tamzen works when these other three don't.
As seth already indicated find the fonts new name from `fc-list`
Edit:
soundtoxin wrote:
Also, Termite does not use .Xresources. So what change am I supposed to make?
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Termite#Font

Thank you so much! I was having trouble understanding the output at first. It looks like 'tewi' is now 'lucy tewi'. I guess that solves this, then!

Arch Linux

#1 2017-02-12 18:59:23

Massive font breakage on all my Arch machines (and my NixOS machine?!)

#2 2017-02-12 19:21:35

Re: Massive font breakage on all my Arch machines (and my NixOS machine?!)

#3 2017-02-12 19:39:08

Re: Massive font breakage on all my Arch machines (and my NixOS machine?!)

#4 2017-02-12 20:11:52

Re: Massive font breakage on all my Arch machines (and my NixOS machine?!)

#5 2017-02-12 20:18:14

Re: Massive font breakage on all my Arch machines (and my NixOS machine?!)

#6 2017-02-12 20:22:48

Re: Massive font breakage on all my Arch machines (and my NixOS machine?!)

#7 2017-02-12 20:37:32

Re: Massive font breakage on all my Arch machines (and my NixOS machine?!)

#8 2017-02-12 20:46:27

Re: Massive font breakage on all my Arch machines (and my NixOS machine?!)

#9 2017-02-12 20:53:05

Re: Massive font breakage on all my Arch machines (and my NixOS machine?!)

#10 2017-02-13 12:33:06

Re: Massive font breakage on all my Arch machines (and my NixOS machine?!)

#11 2017-02-13 22:27:11

Re: Massive font breakage on all my Arch machines (and my NixOS machine?!)

#12 2017-02-14 13:30:42

Re: Massive font breakage on all my Arch machines (and my NixOS machine?!)

#13 2017-02-14 20:19:55

Re: Massive font breakage on all my Arch machines (and my NixOS machine?!)

#14 2017-02-14 20:38:07

Re: Massive font breakage on all my Arch machines (and my NixOS machine?!)

#15 2017-02-14 20:39:00

Re: Massive font breakage on all my Arch machines (and my NixOS machine?!)

#16 2017-02-14 20:57:32

Re: Massive font breakage on all my Arch machines (and my NixOS machine?!)

#17 2017-02-14 21:03:46

Re: Massive font breakage on all my Arch machines (and my NixOS machine?!)

#18 2017-02-14 21:04:20

Re: Massive font breakage on all my Arch machines (and my NixOS machine?!)

#19 2017-02-14 21:07:28

Re: Massive font breakage on all my Arch machines (and my NixOS machine?!)

#20 2017-02-14 21:08:34

Re: Massive font breakage on all my Arch machines (and my NixOS machine?!)

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