Created attachment 38165 [details]
example to create the bug described

It does work for me at home. I'll take a closer look at it tomorrow at work.

I suspect it's some font-install issue or so.

Works for me at work to.

What is the output of 
rpm -qa | grep -i font

And what language/locale do you run in?

my machine is a clean RH 7.2 install, 

LANG=en_US
locale is default

I'm sure it's a font config problem, but I couldn't spot anything obvious.
my machine is a clean RH7.2 with official patches.  All other programs seem
to run great - although my .xsession-errors shows:
xmlencoding detect- iso-8859-1
don't know what program makes this.  Any way, the other font info is:

odonnell@sagerdell(pts/1)~$ rpm -qa | grep -i font
urw-fonts-2.0-12
XFree86-ISO8859-7-100dpi-fonts-1.0-10
ttfonts-ja-1.0-7
XFree86-ISO8859-15-100dpi-fonts-4.1.0-3
XFree86-KOI8-R-100dpi-fonts-1.0-6
chkfontpath-1.9.5-2
ttfonts-1.0-4
XFree86-75dpi-fonts-4.1.0-3
XFree86-ISO8859-7-Type1-fonts-1.0-10
XFree86-100dpi-fonts-4.1.0-3
tetex-fonts-1.0.7-30
XFree86-ISO8859-7-75dpi-fonts-1.0-10
XFree86-ISO8859-15-75dpi-fonts-4.1.0-3
ghostscript-fonts-5.50-3

I don't understand it. I just installed the same fonts, and it works for me.

Can you try:
xfd -fn -adobe-helvetica-bold-o-normal-*-100-*-*-*-*-*-*-*

And see if it works?

odonnell@sagerdell(pts/6)~$ xfd -fn \
-adobe-helvetica-bold-o-normal-*-100-*-*-*-*-*-*-*

Warning: Cannot convert string
"-adobe-helvetica-bold-o-normal-*-100-*-*-*-*-*-*-*" to type FontStruct
xfd:  no font to display

but the following does display a font:

xfd -fn -adobe-helvetica-bold-o-normal-*-*-*-100-*-*-*-*-*

the font displayed is:
-Adobe-Helvetica-Bold-O-Normal--11-80-100-100-P-60-ISO8859-1

John.

I wonder why it couldn't give a 100 pixel font?

Dia does that to get some metrics it can scale.

Alex,

here's everything that I have that's close:

odonnell@sagerdell(pts/0)~/work$ xlsfonts -fn \       
-adobe-helvetica-bold-o-normal-*-100-*-*-*-*-*-*
-adobe-helvetica-bold-o-normal--10-100-75-75-p-60-iso10646-1
-adobe-helvetica-bold-o-normal--10-100-75-75-p-60-iso8859-1
-adobe-helvetica-bold-o-normal--10-100-75-75-p-60-iso8859-15
-adobe-helvetica-bold-o-normal--14-100-100-100-p-82-iso10646-1
-adobe-helvetica-bold-o-normal--14-100-100-100-p-82-iso8859-1
-adobe-helvetica-bold-o-normal--14-100-100-100-p-82-iso8859-15

John.

I found item 17 in the FAQ addresses this issue.  So I followed it's directions
step by step, and it now works.  urw-aliases, with a modified config file
is the key to success.  How about making the RH 7.2 install do this.  (not
needed for RH 7.1).  I have yet to meet in a person anybody who had this working
from a vanillar RH 7.2 install.

John.

We have this exact same problem with Dia and a default RedHat 7.2 install. 
John's suggestion (follow item 17 in Dia's FAQ) worked, but it requires
installing a third party font package.   It seems weird that others aren't able
to reproduce this problem.   The URL for Dia's FAQ is:
http://www.lysator.liu.se/~alla/dia/faq.html#FontSupport

It's strange that it seems to work for me.

I wonder why the adobe font didn't work while the urw one did.

I can't add urw-aliases to the distro though, since that would change which
fonts apps would get. I'd like to know what was different between them though.

We will have some rearrangement of the fonts in the next version i think. I'll
take a closer look at this then.

I have the same problem with Dia on RHL 7.2. It seems that the font path setup 
for an everything install causes this to happen. On a different box with
a custom install without all the packages, Dia can use different fonts.

Hmmm. I have a bad feeling about this. Tammy, do you have Abiword installed on
the machine where it doesn't work?

Yes, abiword is installed. I tried rpm -e abiword and then killall -USR1 xfs to
reread the font server config file, but it still does the same thing. Feel
feel to come look at my box. I have 2 systems that are behaving this way.

After upgrading to RH7.3 (actually, a fresh, custom install, which I then
brought up to date using up2date), I got a similar problem: Dia couldn't find
ANY font (besides courier), it seemed.

Following the FAQ helped.

By comparing /etc/X11/fs/config with versions from other machines running RH7.2,
I realized that two entries were conspicuously absent from the "catalogue"
variable:

    /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi
    /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi

(The ":unscaled" versions of these entries are there.)

Adding these entries to /etc/X11/fs/config, after undoing the changes suggested
by the FAQ, also seemed to resolve the problem.

I don't know anything about fontserver configuration, but it seems as if the
above two enries should be there, and thus that something went wrong during
the installation (I certainly had not touched the config file prior to trying
to fix the problem with Dia). Maybe I chose an odd collection of font RPMs
to install?

For reference, here are my font packages:

thoth-1% rpm -qa | grep -i font
XFree86-truetype-fonts-4.2.0-8
chkfontpath-1.9.5-2
XFree86-75dpi-fonts-4.2.0-8
urw-fonts-2.0-17
XFree86-base-fonts-4.2.0-8
XFree86-ISO8859-15-100dpi-fonts-4.2.0-8
ghostscript-fonts-5.50-3
XFree86-font-utils-4.2.0-8
ttfonts-ja-1.2-8
XFree86-ISO8859-15-75dpi-fonts-4.2.0-8
ttfonts-1.0-9
XFree86-100dpi-fonts-4.2.0-8
tetex-fonts-1.0.7-47
XFree86-cyrillic-fonts-4.2.0-8

/Henrik

rawhide now has dia 0.91, which uses gtk2. It handles fonts quite differently,
so this problem should be gone.

*** Bug 76851 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***