Fontforge displays blank tabs/windows for tools; hangs X; enrages OS

cfr · 2013-12-23 02:47:22

For some reason, I thought fontforge was in AUR so I thought I had issues just because I needed to rebuild or something and kept putting it off. However, now I went to rebuild it, I discover it is not from AUR at all. Which is to say, this has been going on for a while.

I can open a font in fontforge fine. I can scroll through it and I can choose menu options provided they do not open a new window/dialogue/tab etc.

If the menu item opens a new window/dialogue/tab etc., I get a blank white window opened as a new tab (usually 2 such windows). I'm unable to control these or close them however, they go when the font in question is closed. I can generally continue to use fontforge in other ways OK. I can even continue to view the font which I triggered the problem tabs from.

Not always, though. Sometimes, fontforge not only hangs but hangs X. That is, X (KDE) becomes entirely non-responsive and my laptop goes nuts, fans whirr to try to keep up with the heat etc. Today I tirggered this by attempting to view the detail of a glyph by double-clicking on it.

I can switch to a tty, login and kill fontforge. This is sufficient to get X/KDE working just fine again.

journalctl -b shows nothing which looks even faintly related.

~/.xsession-errors contains volumes of errors but that's usual. KDE seems to spew them in the same way animals breathe i.e. simply as a side-effect of existence. Since this log doesn't include times, it is hard to say what might be relevant. However, I can locate the point at which I open Fontforge:

X Error: BadWindow (invalid Window parameter) 3
  Major opcode: 20 (X_GetProperty)
  Resource id:  0x500018d
NETWM: Warning readIcon() needs buffer adjustment!
NETWM: Warning readIcon() needs buffer adjustment!
Copyright (c) 2000-2012 by George Williams.
 Executable based on sources from 14:57 GMT 31-Jul-2012-ML-D.
 Library based on sources from 14:57 GMT 31-Jul-2012.
NETWM: Warning readIcon() needs buffer adjustment!
NETWM: Warning readIcon() needs buffer adjustment!
NETWM: Warning readIcon() needs buffer adjustment!
...
<I don't think the NETWM warning is relevant since I get those all the time recently - not just with fontforge - and it is just a warning, not an error>
...
QPainter::begin: Paint device returned engine == 0, type: 2
QPainter::end: Painter not active, aborted
...
<repeats many times - not sure about this one but it isn't all through the logs - just I am not sure why fontforge would involve QPainter>
....
kwin(1067) KWin::checkGLError: GL error ( PostPaint ):  "GL_INVALID_ENUM"
...
<repeats>
...

The next distinct error/warning I get is something I'm pretty sure is firefox related and so probably after I killed fontforge.

I realise this is rather sketchy. Does this suggest anything to anybody? Maybe a way of trying to narrow down the problem a little? I searched Arch's bugs and the forums and the closest I came was a seg fault problem in a thread started by me. But that seemed to be caused by Adobe and fontforge isn't seg faulting in this case, so I think this must be a different problem. (In that case, fontforge seg faulted on launch i.e. I never got to view the font at all.)

cfr · 2013-12-24 03:06:30

I'm almost sure this is some sort of weird interaction between fontforge and kwin (or kwin as configured on my machine) or, at the very least, that some of what I'm seeing is due to this or exacerbated by this.

However, I'm having trouble disentangling fontforge from kwin. I think part of the issue is that it is opening things like tools and detailed views of glyphs as tabs rather than new windows. For some reason, when tabbed, such windows are blank. More specifically, if I open up a glyph, the view of the glyph is in a tab I cannot select and the tools window is in a tab which appears blank. If I untab this, I can see the tools and select the tab showing the glyph (which is not blank for some reason).

I've tried setting up a rule high in my list telling kwin not to autogroup fontforge windows of any kind on the basis of anything. However, this appears to have had no effect. I do use autogrouping of windows by default so I know why kwin wants to do it. But application-specific settings should override. For example, they do so for the gimp.

Does anybody have any thoughts on how I might investigate/work around this?

Arch Linux

#1 2013-12-23 02:47:22

Fontforge displays blank tabs/windows for tools; hangs X; enrages OS

#2 2013-12-24 03:06:30

Re: Fontforge displays blank tabs/windows for tools; hangs X; enrages OS

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