Re: [ jEdit-users ] font error messages on start up

[mike d. <md...@st...>]

On Sun, 13 Aug 2000, David Filion wrote:
> When starting jEdit I receive the following font errors:

as you may have guessed, this problem is larger than jEdit. it is the result of
the open nature of GNU/Linux distributions and the closed nature of the font
world, which have created a situation where it is hard to tell what fonts will
be on a particular user's system. i don't know of any JDK's for Linux that get
it right without shipping all their own fonts (which usually suck).

> Font specified in font.properties not found 
> [--symbol-medium-r-normal--*-%d-*-*-p-*-adobe-fontspecific]
> 
> I believe this is caused by a missing font.  Is this true?  If so how can I
> fix it?

the font.properties file for your JDK is not using an appropriate font string
for the Symbol font as it exists on your system. to fix this, you have to
figure out what the Symbol font is called on your system and edit the
font.properties file (in $JAVA_HOME/jre/lib) to match.

to find the symbol font on your system, execute the following command in a
terminal running under X windows:

[mike@prometheus ~]$ xlsfonts | egrep -- "-symbol-.*-0-0-0-0-"

this will find all scalable fonts (e.g. Type1 or TrueType) with the string
'symbol' as the font name or foundry (basically, you're only going to find it
in the font name).

on my system, the result is:

-urw-symbol-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-urw-fontspecific

so, if i had your problem, i would edit every line matching the error output to
look like this:

-urw-symbol-medium-r-normal--*-%d-*-*-p-*-urw-fontspecific

once this is done, you restart any AWT application (yes, Swing is still AWT at
the lowest level), and see if there are any more errors. because of the way the
font.properties file is loaded, not all errors will be reported and fixing one
error can reveal a previously hidden error later in the file.

once you have no errors, you're done (unless you want the rest of the fonts to
not look like ass, in which case you'll have to install TrueType fonts and poke
your way through substituting them in the correct lines of font.properties).

-md