Emacs Display Recangular blocks instead of fonts

["Kumar, Amit" <ahkumar@mail.smu.edu>]

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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


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