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gmaslov

Member

Registered: 2012-11-17

Posts: 2

[SOLVED] Chromium tab title text garbled/scrambled

I'm getting some very unusual text corruption with Chromium. It only appears in the tab titles, nowhere else, and only in Chromium. Sometimes some tabs show up correctly, but usually it's this weird garbled mess:

I'm using the nvidia 310.19-2 drivers on AMD 64-bit, although I'm also having the same issue on a different computer with a similar setup, which is a 32-bit Intel with an old enough Nvidia Quadro that it's forced to use the downgraded nvidia-96xx and xorg-server1.10 packages from the AUR. I'm using the xmonad window manager.

Changing the Chromium theme doesn't help. I haven't tried downgrading Cairo etc since this seems like a different issue than the global text rendering bug that people were seeing. It almost seems like some kind of localization trouble, but I have no idea.

Anyone else having this problem?

Last edited by gmaslov (2012-11-17 18:39:42)

xhc

Member

Registered: 2012-02-01

Posts: 113

Re: [SOLVED] Chromium tab title text garbled/scrambled

exactly in this topic: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=152753

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gmaslov

Member

Registered: 2012-11-17

Posts: 2

Re: [SOLVED] Chromium tab title text garbled/scrambled

Thanks. Performed the following downgrades:

warning: downgrading package pixman (0.28.0-1 => 0.26.2-1)
warning: downgrading package cairo (1.12.8-2 => 1.12.6-2)
warning: downgrading package xorg-server (1.13.0-4 => 1.13.0-3)

That fixed the garbled text problem after a login/logout (I'm using XDM), but the transparency problem described in the linked post remained (which I actually thought was caused by my theme, but it turns out it's really a bug). After a full reboot that problem went away too. I'll mark this as solved, though I wish I knew why I had this additional garbled-text symptom while other people only had a transparency problem.

CodeFarmer

Member

Registered: 2012-04-26

Posts: 9

Re: [SOLVED] Chromium tab title text garbled/scrambled

I have just now started seeing this exact thing (the garbled text - I don't see the transparency bug), after doing a fresh Arch install on my laptop.

It's a year and a half (and a couple of xorg-server point releases, Chromium to Version 34.0.1847.132 (265804)) after this thread first appeared, so it seems unlikely that the precise fix above still applies. Also, I never had it happen until now. A recurrence?

It garbles it differently for different websites. The BBC news page is called "AAB Mdvr , Gnld" which is "BBC News - Home" with all the characters decremented. But other pages appear in right-to-left, or Farsi script, or... who knows what else.

Last edited by CodeFarmer (2014-05-07 12:44:04)

CodeFarmer

Member

Registered: 2012-04-26

Posts: 9

Re: [SOLVED] Chromium tab title text garbled/scrambled

...and now it's not.

In the meantime I installed steam and its various associated bits of multilib, and had a reboot, some part of which appears to have fixed Chromium.

Some kind of lib32 thing?

ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 19,771

Re: [SOLVED] Chromium tab title text garbled/scrambled

...Some kind of lib32 thing?

Could be.  Could have been a partial upgrade due to a partially synced mirror.
As you point out, much has changed in a couple years.   I am going to go ahead and close this ancient thread with the hope that your problem is solved.  If the problem should recur, feel free to start a new thread that you will own.  If you feel it appropriate, link back to this one.

Thanks.

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