Bug 508383

Where did you find those directions?  They are for XEmacs 21.4, which had only partial and somewhat buggy support for reading Unicode.  Version 21.5 should read Unicode files out of the box.  Can you restore the RPM packages and see if you can reproduce the problem with "xemacs -vanilla"?  If you can, would you please attach a file that demonstrates the problem?

Created attachment 349607 [details]
illustration of font problem

Where did you get that font?  I've got every single package available in the F-11 repository with the string "dejavu" in the name installed on my box, and I get this:

$ xlsfonts -fn '-misc-dejavu sans mono-medium-r-*-*-*-220-*-*-*-*-iso10646-1'
xlsfonts: pattern "-misc-dejavu sans mono-medium-r-*-*-*-220-*-*-*-*-iso10646-1" unmatched

In fact, it looks like none of the dejavu fonts are available via the legacy font system anymore.  They appear to be fontconfig only at this point.

(In reply to comment #3)
> Where did you get that font?

baron@bloch /etc/X11/fontpath.d/dejavu # rpm -qf DejaVuSansMono.ttf 
dejavu-sans-mono-fonts-2.29-2.fc11.noarch

So are you running ttfmkdir on system font dirs to make TrueType fonts available to the legacy font system?  You appear to have done something above and beyond what Fedora provides to get access to a font that doesn't display correctly.

I have tried several of the legacy fonts that are available in Fedora, and so far all of them have displayed the left and right quotes correctly in XEmacs.

The << and >> characters you mentioned in comment #1 are called guillemets, by the way, and are the quotation marks symbols used in French writing (as well as a number of other languages).  I wonder if you're having some kind of locale problem, rather than a font problem.

(In reply to comment #5)
> So are you running ttfmkdir on system font dirs to make TrueType fonts
> available to the legacy font system?  You appear to have done something above
> and beyond what Fedora provides to get access to a font that doesn't display
> correctly.

I did not do anything special.  I even checked another computer that had a relatively fresh install (actually upgraded from FC9, but that is the best I can do), and it was the same.  All I did was install the dejavu fonts.

> I have tried several of the legacy fonts that are available in Fedora, and so
> far all of them have displayed the left and right quotes correctly in XEmacs.
> 
> The << and >> characters you mentioned in comment #1 are called guillemets, by
> the way, and are the quotation marks symbols used in French writing (as well as

Thanks.  The other problem, though, is that many of these characters are TINY, as well as incorrect.

> a number of other languages).  I wonder if you're having some kind of locale
> problem, rather than a font problem.  

from env:
LANG=en_US.utf8

Do you know some other font that makes a clear distinction between l and 1?  Bitstream vera sans does make this distinction but has the same problem with quotes, etc.  For the work I do, this is crucial.  I'm happy to switch fonts if there is some other one.

p.s. I meant eta, not chi, in my earlier comment.

(In reply to comment #5)

> The << and >> characters you mentioned in comment #1 are called guillemets, by
> the way, and are the quotation marks symbols used in French writing

I looked more carefully.  The problem was that they are so small.  They are actually the correct symbols, but they were too small for me to notice that unless I took my glasses off and practically pressed my nose to the screen.  (I'm nearsighted.)

So it is clear that the problem is NOT what I originally thought.  It is not the failure to do unicode.  It is purely a size problem.

If nobody else is having this problem, maybe it isn't worth pursuing.  I have been living with it for years.  (I have a script that converts these characters to more standard ones.  The trouble is that I can't keep up with Microsoft, which keeps inventing new ones.  Mostly these result from using antiword on doc files.)

I also reported this to the xemacs bug reporting system, and received very helpful replies from Stephen Turnbull.  Apparently one problem is that the Fedora version of xemacs is compiled without Xft.  There may be a reason for that, but, if so, it would be nice then to have a second version WITH Xft.  Eventually I will try compiling from source, but I don't have time at the moment.

The discussion is at 
xemacs-tracker.org
and the number of the issue is 536.  You need to register to see this, I think.

Apparently there IS no other monospace font that is anywhere as nice as dejavu sans mono or vera sans mono (which has the same problem), so this might be an issue worth pursuing after all.

Sorry, the url is
http://tracker.xemacs.org/XEmacs/its/issue536

I tried compiling from the srpm, with
rpmbuild -bb --with-xft xemacs.spec
and it stopped in the middle with an error that I cannot figure out.  The last few lines on my screen were:

/usr/bin/ld: Dwarf Error: Offset (7110) greater than or equal to .debug_str size (1804).
font-mgr.o: In function `Ffc_config_set_rescan_interval':
/home/baron/rpmbuild/BUILD/xemacs-21.5.28/src/font-mgr.c:926: undefined reference to `FcConfigSetRescanInverval_REPLACE_BY_FcConfigSetRescanInterval'
font-mgr.o: In function `Ffc_config_get_rescan_interval':
/home/baron/rpmbuild/BUILD/xemacs-21.5.28/src/font-mgr.c:912: undefined reference to `FcConfigGetRescanInverval_REPLACE_BY_FcConfigGetRescanInterval'
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make[1]: *** [temacs] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/baron/rpmbuild/BUILD/xemacs-21.5.28/src'
make: *** [src] Error 2
error: Bad exit status from /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.PidvIz (%build)

Looking at /var/tmp/... gave me no clue that I could decipher.

In reply to comment #10, that appears to be fallout from a bug in earlier versions of libfontconfig.so, where FcConfigGetRescanInterval was misspelled FcConfigGetRescanInverval.  XEmacs has code to detect the misspelling and work around it.  Apparently the workaround misfired here.  I'll have a look and see if I can figure out how to fix the workaround.

(In reply to comment #11)
> In reply to comment #10, that appears to be fallout from a bug in earlier
> versions of libfontconfig.so, where FcConfigGetRescanInterval was misspelled
> FcConfigGetRescanInverval.  XEmacs has code to detect the misspelling and work
> around it.  Apparently the workaround misfired here.  I'll have a look and see
> if I can figure out how to fix the workaround.  

It seems to be in xemacs-21.5-28/src/font-mgr.c.
I tried just changing Inverval to Interval in that file, and then everything seemed to work, step by step, until the last step, which was
rpmbuild -bb --short-circuit --with xft xemacs.spec
when I got (after much encouraging output):

/home/baron/rpmbuild/BUILD/xemacs-21.5.28/src/font-mgr.c:926: undefined reference to `FcConfigSetRescanInverval_REPLACE_BY_FcConfigSetRescanInterval'
font-mgr.o: In function `Ffc_config_get_rescan_interval':
/home/baron/rpmbuild/BUILD/xemacs-21.5.28/src/font-mgr.c:912: undefined reference to `FcConfigGetRescanInverval_REPLACE_BY_FcConfigGetRescanInterval'
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make[1]: *** [temacs] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/baron/rpmbuild/BUILD/xemacs-21.5.28/src'
make: *** [src] Error 2
error: Bad exit status from /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.RbHyiF (%build)

I don't know C. I'm giving up and hoping that you/someone else can fix this.

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Argh, this completely fell off my radar for months.  Jonathan, are you still having this problem?  I'll also note that I plan to create an xemacs-xft package in the very near future, which may help.

(In reply to comment #14)
> Argh, this completely fell off my radar for months.  Jonathan, are you still
> having this problem?  I'll also note that I plan to create an xemacs-xft
> package in the very near future, which may help.    

Sorry.  But I have now switched to emacs because it does anti-aliasing (and for other reasons).  I just tried xemacs, and I could not find an example to test it on.

Thanks for checking.  In that case, I'm going to close this bug report.