font problem on (Some) Linux

I think this is a system problem but I'll ask to see if anyone knows the answer

or can provide some hints.

I have an application that is used to simulate and analyze radiographic

images. This runs on Windows and Linux, RedHat mostly. It is being move

to Scientific Linux and Unbuntu. (VW 7.10.1 RHEL 6.6 SL 6.6)

We use the Business Graphics package to plot line outs of the images. On the

Scientific Linux and Ubuntu platforms the plots fail when logged on directly.

When logged directly on the a RedHat system or remoting in

with Reflections to a Scientific Linux box, in  the method

BG_Label -> compose after the line where the textStyle alignment

is set, the textStyle->defaultFontPolicy->defaultFont name returns

adobe-courier-medium....

When logged directly on to a Scientific Linux box it returns

schumacher-clean-medium.... and fails when using the image width

a few steps later.

The Scientific Linux has the xorg 75 dpi, 100dpi and misc packages from

loaded. I think the problem is in the search path for the fonts but

looking at /etc/fonts/fonts.conf the search dirs are the same. I've run

fc-cache but that didn't change anything other than build my own copy

of fontconfig in my directory.

Any suggestions?

I’d suggest looking at Xft in the public repository. It uses modern anti-aliased fonts and font APIs. Like everything that Holger Kleinsorgen publishes, it’s well-made, reliable, doesn’t have a tendency to break other things, and is maintained up-to-date with VW and OS versions. Many of our problems with Cincom’s fonts on Linux just disappeared when we started using it. We also load Xft-Integration and Xft-Performance, but not Xft-DesktopIntegration.

We do have a couple of changes (attached) to Xft that I haven’t integrated, because I’m not certain if they’re applicable to everyone:

FontDescription>>xftPixelSize

*Correction: change xftDPI fallback value from 96 to 75, else fonts are small (without Xft-DesktopIntegration?)

FontDescription>>xftFontPatternString

* Correction: Xft font matching was only using the first named font family or manufacturer/foundry from font descriptions that specified several. Visible problems/differences in fonts in MetaEdit+ included:

  - code font (e.g. in MERL Generator Editor) displayed a full empty space after each character on OpenSuSE

  - system font (e.g. lists in Startup Launcher) was serif on OpenSuSE

  - #sans serif font in symbols is now a fraction thinner on Ubuntu and OpenSuSE, matching that on Windows

* Correction: Xft font matching now filters out * wildcards from font descriptions, as these are not supported by Xft

* Correction: Xft font matching was not escaping reserved characters in font family (\ - : ,) and manufacturer/foundry (\ - : , = _)

* Correction: If a manufacturer/foundry specification is "adobe or *", ignore the foundry on Xft.

- Many VW font descriptions specify manufacturer/foundry as "adobe or *", but in most cases the desired Xft font is not made by Adobe. Xft weights foundry higher than any other factor, whereas without Xft foundry has little weight, so simply ignoring it gives matches closer to the non-Xft situation for which the font descriptions were originally made.

All the best, and many thanks to Holger!

Steve