Fonts distortion

adamrehard · 2012-03-27 20:04:00

I'm have an interesting problem. The fonts on my system will occasionally randomly distort and become unreadable.
This is the only thread I've seen that looks like my problem. I've looked in the wiki and found nothing. I unfortunately can't figure out how to take a screenshot without the fonts returning to normal when I switch windows.

Adam

sas · 2012-03-28 17:59:14

You will have to be a little more verbose than that, if you want other users to be able to help you...

- What do you mean by "randomly distort"? Do certain characters get replaced by garbled pixmaps, but each instance of the same character with the same pixmap? Or does the text as a whole become distorted in some way? (How?)
- Which desktop environment are you using? Did you check whether it also happens with other desktop environments?
- Which font are you using? Did you check whether it also happens with other fonts?
- Which graphics driver are you using? In case of an AMD or Nvidia card, did you check whether it happens with both the closed-source and the open-source driver?
- Which text is affected? Only in the application UI (menus, buttons...) or also in the application content?
- Does it happen with all applications? Does it matter which toolkit (Gtk, Qt, ...) the application uses?
- Which freetype libraries (and/or other font rendering libraries/systems) are you using?
- Which customizations have you made to your system's font configuration (either through config files in /usr/share/fonts/ or ~/.fonts/, or through your desktop environment's GUI?)
- Anything else that might be relevant?

hadrons123 · 2012-03-28 18:48:42

@sas

16 questions, seriously?
The OP has a lot of work to do, to get back in this thread.

Last edited by hadrons123 (2012-03-28 18:50:14)

adamrehard · 2012-03-28 18:58:44

It's not just certain characters, but more certain UI elements. When it affects one part of the element, it affects the whole element.
I'm using Musca.
I'm using the default fonts, and it seems to be font independent as it happens both in Chrome, Terminator, and Xchat. that's about all I have installed.
In Terminator in affects the text rather than UI, but does the opposite in Chrome.
I'm using an ATI Radeon HD 4350 and xf86-video-ati 6.14.3-2.
It happens with all the (4) applications I have installed, except my VM (virtualbox).
I installed ttf-dejavu during the post install but nothing else.
Nothing

Last edited by adamrehard (2012-03-28 19:19:00)

adamrehard · 2012-03-28 19:31:20

I can't seem to install the closed-source ATI driver without breaking X.
It's window manager independent, or at least widespread. It still happens on openbox and twm.

.xinitrc

/var/log/Xorg.0.log

/var/log/Xorg.0.log.old

Last edited by adamrehard (2012-03-28 19:51:54)

sas · 2012-03-28 20:31:52

adamrehard wrote:

It's not just certain characters, but more certain UI elements. When it affects one part of the element, it affects the whole element.
[...]

Hm, I guess it might be some kind of pixmap cache corruption in the X server / graphics driver...

With the open-source driver, you could try disabling/tweaking some of the 2D pixmap caching/acceleration (and related) features it provides in combination with the X server, by creating the config file /etc/X11/xorg.conf and adding a section of the form...

Section "Device"
    Identifier "Radeon"
    Driver "radeon"
    # insert options here
EndSection

...and then experimenting with various options like:

    Option "EXAPixmaps" "off"

or

    Option "EXANoComposite" "TRUE"

    Option "EXANoUploadToScreen" "TRUE"

    Option "EXANoDownloadFromScreen" "TRUE"

    Option "ExaOptimizeMigration" "off"

or

    Option "AccelMethod" "XAA"

and/or

    Option "AccelDFS" "off"

or

    Option "DRI" "off"

etc.

(You will have to restart the X server after each change to test it.)

The wiki also suggests disabling kernel mode setting in case of artifacts, so try that as well.

adamrehard wrote:

I can't seem to install the closed-source ATI driver without breaking X.

Did you complete all the necessary configuration steps for the closed-source driver? (Creating an appropriate xorg.conf, loading only the correct module (through rc.conf or otherwise), and disabling kernel modesetting - see https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ca … figuration)

Last edited by sas (2012-03-28 20:43:45)

adamrehard · 2012-03-28 20:55:14

 Option "EXAPixmaps" "off"

seems to have fixed it. Thanks so much, I never would have thought of anything close.
could you please explain what this does?

sas · 2012-03-28 21:38:07

adamrehard wrote:

could you please explain what this does?

EXA is the new 2D hardware render-acceleration architecture of the Xorg server, which replaced the older XAA architecture (see the Wikipedia article).

EXAPixmaps is an option provided by the open-source ATI driver (and only relevant together with kernel mode-setting) which, as I understand it, defines whether EXA is allowed to cache non-essential pixmaps in the graphics card's internal memory. Doing this is supposed to increase performance (especially for desktop compositing using Xrender and similar use-cases), but is not essential. (You can read the official definition by typing `man radeon` in a terminal.)

As all pixmap caching solutions, though, it is principally prone to pixmap corruption if the code that's using it (in this case either the EXA framework itself, or, more likely, the ATI driver) has bugs in it... :-/

Last edited by sas (2012-03-28 21:47:20)

Arch Linux

#1 2012-03-27 20:04:00

Fonts distortion

#2 2012-03-28 17:59:14

Re: Fonts distortion

#3 2012-03-28 18:48:42

Re: Fonts distortion

#4 2012-03-28 18:58:44

Re: Fonts distortion

#5 2012-03-28 19:31:20

Re: Fonts distortion

#6 2012-03-28 20:31:52

Re: Fonts distortion

#7 2012-03-28 20:55:14

Re: Fonts distortion

#8 2012-03-28 21:38:07

Re: Fonts distortion

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