Dear All,

I am here is a deadlock situation and can’t figure out this font problem: I have extensively looked online for a solution and none seems to work, and have been very disturbed by the fact that I can get this to work.

I get this very famous error, but my efforts have been futile to fix this:

Warning: Cannot convert string "-*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*" to type FontStruct

Warning: Cannot convert string "-*-helvetica-medium-r-*--*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1" to type FontStruct

What I don’t understand is why is emacs resorting to these fonts, if it has problems can’t it use some other fonts to display a normal screen? Instead it displays rectangular boxes for each letter.

Below here are the details of the version of the OS and packages installed and further details. Hope you can help me understand the problem that can lead me to a solution, and make me feel better in helping me fix this. It has been a day-mare!

Best Regards,

Amit

Linux: Scientific Linux SL release 5.5

$ rpm -qa | grep emacs

emacs-common-21.4-20.el5

emacspeak-23.0-3.el5

emacs-21.4-20.el5

emacs-leim-21.4-20.el5

$ rpm -qa | grep fonts

xorg-x11-fonts-misc-7.1-2.1.el5

xorg-x11-fonts-ISO8859-15-100dpi-7.1-2.1.el5

bitstream-vera-fonts-1.10-7

xorg-x11-fonts-ISO8859-1-75dpi-7.1-2.1.el5

xorg-x11-fonts-Type1-7.1-2.1.el5

xorg-x11-fonts-ISO8859-15-75dpi-7.1-2.1.el5

urw-fonts-2.3-6.1.1

xorg-x11-fonts-ISO8859-2-75dpi-7.1-2.1.el5

xorg-x11-fonts-ISO8859-9-100dpi-7.1-2.1.el5

xorg-x11-fonts-ISO8859-9-75dpi-7.1-2.1.el5

xorg-x11-fonts-ISO8859-14-100dpi-7.1-2.1.el5

xorg-x11-fonts-100dpi-7.1-2.1.el5

xorg-x11-fonts-syriac-7.1-2.1.el5

xorg-x11-fonts-ISO8859-14-75dpi-7.1-2.1.el5

xorg-x11-fonts-base-7.1-2.1.el5

xorg-x11-fonts-75dpi-7.1-2.1.el5

ghostscript-fonts-5.50-13.1.1

tetex-fonts-3.0-33.8.el5_5.5

xorg-x11-fonts-ISO8859-1-100dpi-7.1-2.1.el5

xorg-x11-fonts-truetype-7.1-2.1.el5

xorg-x11-fonts-cyrillic-7.1-2.1.el5

liberation-fonts-1.0-1.el5

xorg-x11-fonts-ethiopic-7.1-2.1.el5

xorg-x11-fonts-ISO8859-2-100dpi-7.1-2.1.el5

Fonts directory listed in /etc/fonts/fonts.conf

…..

<!-- Font directory list -->

  <dir>/usr/share/fonts</dir>

  <dir>/usr/share/X11/fonts/Type1</dir>

  <dir>/usr/share/X11/fonts/OTF</dir>

  <dir>/usr/share/X11/fonts/100dpi</dir>

  <dir>/usr/share/X11/fonts/75dpi</dir>

  <dir>/usr/share/X11/fonts/cyrillic</dir>

  <dir>/usr/share/X11/fonts/encodings</dir>

  <dir>/usr/share/X11/fonts/misc</dir>

  <dir>/usr/share/X11/fonts/TTF</dir>

  <dir>/usr/share/X11/fonts/util</dir>

  <dir>~/.fonts</dir>

….

Directory contents:

$ ls /usr/share/fonts/

bitstream-vera  default  java  liberation

$ ls /usr/share/X11/fonts/

100dpi  75dpi  cyrillic  encodings  misc  OTF  TTF  Type1  util

I also ran `fc-cache –f –s –v`  in addition to `xset fp rehash` to clean up cache and rehash it.

$ fc-list | grep -i "courier"

Courier:style=Bold Italic

Courier:style=Regular

Courier 10 Pitch:style=Bold Italic

Courier:style=Oblique

Courier 10 Pitch:style=Italic

Courier:style=Bold Oblique

Courier 10 Pitch:style=Regular

Courier:style=Italic

Courier 10 Pitch:style=Bold

$ fc-list | grep -i helvetica

Helvetica:style=Oblique

Helvetica:style=Bold

Helvetica:style=Regular

Helvetica:style=Bold Oblique