Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 56490
fonts in xfig are wrong
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:10:30 EST
When I try to use font Zapf-Chancery in xfig, I get a pop-up dialog with this error in it: Can't load font -*-itc zapf chancery-medium-i-normal--12-*-*-*-*-*-ISO8859-* trying -*-itc zapf chancery-medium-i-normal--12-*-*-*-*-*-ISO8859-* No good, using 6x13 As far as I can tell, the font names are hard-coded in xfig (that's unfortunate). Either different font names need to be hard-coded in, or the X fonts need to be updated to include the aliases that xfig is looking for. I assume that other font names besides this one are wrong.
Try putting font.alias files in 100dpi and 75dpi directories that associate itc font with whatever ZapfChancery font you have. There are different names for these fonts that couse confusion. I had done this long time ago and it worked.
It's a bug in XFree86.
Patches welcome. ;o)
I haven't seen any upstream movement on this, and haven't seen anyone care enough to report it upstream either, so I assume it is a trivial problem not too worthy of attention. I definitely consider it a minor issue myself, and one which should be dealt with by upstream if anyone is maintaining xfig at all. If xfig is unmaintained and nobody upstream is willing to fix it, then perhaps I should remove it. Red Hat simply doesn't have the engineering resources to take over maintainership of every upstream piece of software that someone chooses to not want to fix bugs in. Closing WONTFIX
Have you reported it upstream?
No, and I don't plan on it. I can't be the middle man on every bug reported here that isn't of high enough significance to warrant me dealing with it myself. We rely on the open source community to fix bugs/problems in their code as much as we help to contribute fixes. And we expect people to also report bugs directly to upstream authors/projects too, and not just rely on Red Hat being a catch all for bug reports. The more time I spend in bugzilla bouncing bugs to upstream people and fiddling around, the less time I'm doing real work. I've been extremely liberal in bug reports in the past, and it has shown me that doing so raises people's expectations that I will troubleshoot every problem reported, or that I will report it myself and follow through until a resolution is found. I don't have the time for that, and many issues are very trivial, and should be reported in the first place to the people whom give the problem a larger exposure and chance of being fixed. Reporting directly to XFree86.org via xpert@xfree86.org mailing list, and continuing to follow up there actively with developers is the best way to get issues addressed, in particular things like this. For example, if I were to encounter a bug in xfig, I would look at the manpage, and find out who exactly wrote it, and then email them a bug report, and possibly other core X members, in an attempt to find out whom is the best to report the problem to. That person stands the best chance to look into the problem, and fix it in a manner consistant with their source code and experience in the problem domain. Bug reports are never ending, and as such, I'll be redirecting many future trivial bug reports to upstream maintainers if I can't justify spending my time on them personally, and have no personal interest in the problem. We here at Red Hat appreciate people reporting bugs, but we also get a lot of very trivial problems reported here that would never get fixed by us, simply because there are always much more important priority bug reports coming in that demand our attention and affect a much much larger userbase. All trivial bug reports should thus be reported where they have the biggest bang. I'm just being honest about the realities of prioritization and time resource management, because I do care that these types of bugs get fixed, and I also know the likelyhood of me personally ever addressing some of them is very slim. So, by me telling people to report it elsewhere, and point them to the proper places, if they follow through, they end up accelerating the chances of someone fixing the problem being reported, and a solution coming forth. I've done this a few times now experimentally, and have seen the results - bugs do get fixed, and then we can pick up the fixes. The end result is faster solutions to problems via delegation. People do not like to be told "go somewhere else please" sometimes, and that is always a risk. What is important though, is that people understand the reason behind it. The reason, as stated above, is to delegate or parallelize problem solving, and accelerate the time to a fix. Sorry if I've went into this deeper than you needed to know, but I've been delegating a bit more lately, and have had some complaints about it, so I'd just like to be honest with everyone reading this, so that they know it is in their own best interest, even if they disagree. I do wish I had 48 hours in a day, and 9 days in a week.... but I don't. ;o/ Anyway... I can now point others here for my delegation speech. ;o) TTYL
Upon further investigation, it appears that this is a bug in neither xfig nor XFree86, but rather a bug in RedHat's installation of xfig. See "NOTE 3" in the README file included with the xfig source distribution. Either Red Hat should patch the font names used by xfig, or it should install the fonts as described in the README file.
Interesting. If this is the case, why is it reported against XFree86? xfig is not part of XFree86. Reassigning to "xfig" component. Not a bug in XFree86. Suggested solution: Remove xfig from the distro and comps. OpenOffice and other utilities duplicate the functionality of this legacy application anyway.
This font name was changed upon my request a number of years ago since then the only vendor providing the zapf fonts was Silicon Graphics. Didn't using font.alias files fix the problem? I do not agree to remove xfig from distro, openoffice is no tool for technical drawings.
'Red Hat Raw Hide' refers to the development tree for Red Hat Linux. Red Hat Linux is no longer supported by Red Hat, Inc. If you are still running Red Hat Linux, you are strongly advised to upgrade to a current Fedora Core release or Red Hat Enterprise Linux or comparable. Some information on which option may be right for you is available at http://www.redhat.com/rhel/migrate/redhatlinux/. Red Hat apologizes that these issues were not resolved in a more timely manner. However, we do want to make sure that important don't slip through the cracks. If these issues are still present in a current release, such as Fedora Core 5, please move these bugs to that product and version. Note that any remaining Red Hat Raw Hide bugs will be closed as 'CANTFIX' on September 30, 2006. Thanks again for your help.
The version of xfig in fc5 no longer prints an error when you try to use the font, but the font doesn't work -- it gets displayed as courier, apparently because xfig still can't find it. This happens for other fonts as well, so whenever and however you fix this, you should review all the fonts on the menu and make sure they all work before considering it fixed.
Hi, I'm a new co-maintainer for xfig, and I can confirm that this bug is still present in Fedora 8. I'll be do my best to fix it.
*** Bug 242274 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 294111 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Someone has written a patch for this and it looks decent, I'll give it a try tomorrow. In the mean time I'm closing this as a duplicate of the bug with the patch. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 210278 ***