Re: Font loading problems with Xarchon.

[capmikee@home.martnet.com]

Sini,

I thought your comments were really helpful. I hope you don't mind if
I cc this to the xarchon list.

(Sini recently wrote to me about the font bug. I said:)
> > I'm really sorry about this- it's a known bug that hasn't yet been
> > dealt with. Are you running KDE? I believe this problem comes up on
> > Mandrake and SUSE because KDE has different fonts from Gnome.
>
>   I have KDE installed, but I run xarchon from Gnome. (It crashes in KDE
> as well, I tested.)
> 
>   You could either just ask for "fixed" as a font (that, I hear, is bound
> to exist on unixen), or have a test for 'if font x not found, use fixed"
> or not specify a font at all, which might give you a reasonable default. I
> haven't read the source enough to have much idea how you use it though.

I suggested the patch I mailed to the list a couple weeks ago. He said:
>   It didn't seem to help enough - the game starts, but if you make the two
> players be computers and let them get themselves in a battle (to make the
> testing go faster ;)), it crashes on not finding
> `-misc-fixed-medium-*-normal-*-40-0-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1' instead. (On both
> Gnome and KDE.)

That's the first time I've heard of that one. I knew there were other
font #defines, but I didn't know where they got used. Thanks for
pointing it out!

A quick grep revealed that the above define is on line 24 of
field.c. You could probably fix it the same way as board.c, replacing
the 40-0 with *-*.

>   I'm under the impression that you can just not ask for a specific font
> and get some friendly default, or that you could be less specific and ask
> for just 'fixed'. But as for details... No idea. ;)

Well then, the current patch probably won't hurt anyone's version of
XArchon. If that's true, we might as well just go ahead with it.

Thanks for your help!

- Mike
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