Arch Linux

Sue_Perb

Member

Registered: 2020-06-25

Posts: 32

[SOLVED] font problems

Hi

I recently had problems with awesome: login was getting stuck in an infinite loop. The solution was updating lua and liblua.so. However, when i was finally able to login, all the non-app-specific fonts (for example, dunst and doom fonts dont work, but firefox and terminal do) stopped working: instead of characters they show boxes with numbers in them. A friend suggested that maybe fontconfig wasn't up to date or that there was a problem with that: however fc-list as root and as me displayed a long list of fonts. I have also reinstalled xorg-font-utils.

Does anyone know what my problem might be?

and yes, i have checked the arch wiki (sorry if i missed anything)

Thanks

Last edited by Sue_Perb (2020-08-25 11:56:32)

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,517

Website

Re: [SOLVED] font problems

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=57855

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"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman

Sue_Perb

Member

Registered: 2020-06-25

Posts: 32

Re: [SOLVED] font problems

sorry for the lack of info but this is all I know.

I have checked journalctl and Xorg logs but they have no mention of fontconfig.

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,517

Website

Re: [SOLVED] font problems

The solution was updating lua and liblua.so.

What does this mean?  How did you update them?  Why were they out of sync with the rest of your system initially?  Posting (or linking to) your complete pacman.log will allow us to see what is actually going on rather than just trying to infer meaning from a vague statement.

however fc-list ... as me displayed a long list of fonts.

If these data are relevant to your understanding of the problem, show us the list, don't just tell us it exists.

Does anyone know what my problem might be?

No.  You've given us literally nothing to work with only vague summaries.

and yes, i have checked the arch wiki (sorry if i missed anything)

Which pages have you checked?  What did you learn?  What did you try?  We can't know if you might have missed something or what you have missed, if you don't tell us what you have persued so far.

I have checked journalctl and Xorg logs...

And are you going to share these with us as indicated in the post I provided in the first response?

Your complete pacman.log, journalctl, and xorg logs would be a good start to providing others a chance to understand what's going on on your system.  Without this there is literally nothing anyone could do but speculate ... and I have a few speculations, but it's be silly to list them all in a guess and check style when each of them could be quickly confirmed or eliminated if you actually shared the relevant logs.

Last edited by Trilby (2020-08-24 16:46:32)

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"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman

Sue_Perb

Member

Registered: 2020-06-25

Posts: 32

Re: [SOLVED] font problems

sorry - The page i looked at on the arch wiki was the fontconfig page; the Troubleshooting section only had info related to specific font problems, not a general problem.

I updated liblua (which was on liblua5.2.so) to liblua5.3.so (using yay). This fixed my login loop problem, in which i would log in, liblua.so would fail, and it would go back to the login screen.

I also googled on "fonts displaying as boxes archlinux" and similar; these also didnt return any relevant results.

here are the logs:

https://ufile.io/z129kdjk (journalctl)

https://ufile.io/uf6xtgia (pacman)

https://ufile.io/9gxfiztu (xdm)

https://ufile.io/t8gsgn4p (xorg.0.log)

https://ufile.io/x4kz3i6g (fc-list)

thanks

Last edited by Sue_Perb (2020-08-24 17:06:22)

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,517

Website

Re: [SOLVED] font problems

Please update your links to use a recommended file sharing site, or one that makes it easier to get to the data.  I did download your pacman.conf and can see that you are not using awesomewm from the repos, but rather an AUR build - this would be good to mention in threads where you are having problems with it - and it is almost certainly the cause of your previous login problem as it needed to be rebuilt (which you avoided by installing a previous lua version).  But for the current problem, it seems you do not have any non-bitmap fonts (e.g., ttf fonts) installed.  This has been covered extensively on the forums: install a ttf/otf font.

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"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman

Sue_Perb

Member

Registered: 2020-06-25

Posts: 32

Re: [SOLVED] font problems

Yes, I did forget about the fact that I have awesome git instead of awesome. However, I tried the solution of reinstalling it before posting, which did nothing.

The file sharing site I used was the best free one I could find.

By " This has been covered extensively on the forums: install a ttf/otf font", do you mean replace all my fonts with ttf ones? Almost all of my current fonts are not working.

thanks

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,517

Website

Re: [SOLVED] font problems

You may have tried to reinstall awesome-git, but you either didn't succeed, or you just reinstalled an already built version.  You need to rebuild aur packages as the libraries it depends on are updated.

There are multiple good file sharing sites recommended in the wiki in our community guidelines, please read them:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Code_of_conduct

And by "install a ttf/otf font" I am not being cryptic nor do I mean something else.  I mean install at least one ttf or otf font.  All of your system fonts are bitmap-only:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=257832
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=248032

Last edited by Trilby (2020-08-25 11:39:23)

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"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman

Sue_Perb

Member

Registered: 2020-06-25

Posts: 32

Re: [SOLVED] font problems

I've actually fixed this in a different way: I reinstalled all font-related x and xorg programs.

Thanks for the help.