RE: Emacs Display Recangular blocks instead of fonts

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

Hi Stephen and Stefan,

Thank for the detailed answer and suggestion. 
I installed it from the source(v24.2) and it works like a charm!

Although when I tried to install the latest version 24.3 it failed to make
Somehow I couldn't find where exactly is "tparm"defined. Nothing fancy simple configure, make fails for this but worked for v24.2
I looked if the function was defined in any of the object files but could not find a reference at all, hope it makes more sense to you guys.
Please let me know what you think.

Thanks for your prompt weekend help!

make[1]: Entering directory `/root/emacs-24.3/src'
gcc -std=gnu99 -nostdlib -Demacs  -I. -I/root/emacs-24.3/src -I../lib -I/root/emacs-24.3/src/../lib   -I/usr/include/gtk-2.0 -I/usr/lib64/gtk-2.0/include -I/usr/include/atk-1.0 -I/usr/include/cairo -I/usr/include/pango-1.0 -I/usr/include/glib-2.0 -I/usr/lib64/glib-2.0/include -I/usr/include/freetype2 -I/usr/include/libpng12   -I/usr/include/freetype2       -I/usr/include/libxml2     -I/usr/include/freetype2      -MMD -MF deps/.d -MP     -g3 -O2   -Wl,-znocombreloc  \
          -o temacs pre-crt0.o /usr/lib64/crt1.o /usr/lib64/crti.o dispnew.o frame.o scroll.o xdisp.o menu.o xmenu.o window.o charset.o coding.o category.o ccl.o character.o chartab.o bidi.o cm.o term.o terminal.o xfaces.o xterm.o xfns.o xselect.o xrdb.o xsmfns.o xsettings.o xgselect.o gtkutil.o   emacs.o keyboard.o macros.o keymap.o sysdep.o buffer.o filelock.o insdel.o marker.o minibuf.o fileio.o dired.o cmds.o casetab.o casefiddle.o indent.o search.o regex.o undo.o alloc.o data.o doc.o editfns.o callint.o eval.o floatfns.o fns.o font.o print.o lread.o syntax.o unexelf.o bytecode.o process.o gnutls.o callproc.o region-cache.o sound.o atimer.o doprnt.o intervals.o textprop.o composite.o xml.o profiler.o     xfont.o ftfont.o xftfont.o ftxfont.o  fontset.o fringe.o image.o  terminfo.o lastfile.o    vm-limit.o   ../lib/libgnu.a      -ltiff -ljpeg -lpng -lz -lm -lgif -lXpm -L/lib64 -lgtk-x11-2.0 -lgdk-x11-2.0 -latk-1.0 -lgdk_pixbuf-2.0 -lm -lpangocairo-1.0 -lpango-1.0 -lcairo -lgobject-2.0 -lgmodule-2.0 -ldl -lglib-2.0   -lSM -lICE -lX11 -lXrender -lXft -lXrender -lfontconfig -lfreetype -lX11      -lrt -lrt    -lxml2 -lz -lm      -ltermcap   -lselinux -lfreetype   -lfontconfig      -lpthread   -lm -lgcc -lc -lgcc /usr/lib64/crtn.o
fns.o: In function `sxhash_float':
/root/emacs-24.3/src/fns.c:4139: warning: memset used with constant zero length parameter; this could be due to transposed parameters
/root/emacs-24.3/src/fns.c:4139: warning: memset used with constant zero length parameter; this could be due to transposed parameters
/root/emacs-24.3/src/fns.c:4139: warning: memset used with constant zero length parameter; this could be due to transposed parameters
terminfo.o: In function `tparam':
/root/emacs-24.3/src/terminfo.c:50: undefined reference to `tparm'
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make[1]: *** [temacs] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/root/emacs-24.3/src'
make: *** [src] Error 2 

-----Original Message-----
From: Stephen J. Turnbull [mailto:stephen@xemacs.org] 
Sent: Sunday, May 26, 2013 9:43 PM
To: Kumar, Amit
Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
Subject: Emacs Display Recangular blocks instead of fonts

Kumar, Amit writes:

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

These are the old-style "server-side" font objects.  These warnings are from Xlib, and indicate that you have a badly configured installation of X11.  It's not really an Emacs problem; your distro is broken.

 > 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?

It should be doing so; I don't know why it doesn't.  I would guess that Emacs is not able to find any fonts at all.  You do seem to have the appropriate fonts installed in your file system (the ones in /usr/share/X11/fonts), so there's a problem with the X server.

I don't recall exactly how modern X servers handle server-side fonts.
You may need a separate "font server" running to use the bitmap and other old-style fonts you have installed.  Look for a font-server package (or change distros, see below).

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

This a configuration file for fontconfig, which is irrelevant to FontStruct.  It's probable that your Emacs was built only with server-side fonts (21.4 is very old), but your server doesn't understand how to render them.  So it substitutes boxes.

The current series of Emacs is 24.x, and older Emacs versions are officially unsupported.  That doesn't mean you won't get help, but it does mean that there are no problems with Emacs 21 where the default solution is anything but "Upgrade, then come talk to us".

If upgrading is possible, you really should do so (for many reasons, not just to make it easier for us to support you).

(Aside: If Scientific Linux [sic] distributes such an old Emacs, what other problems may be hiding in the distro?  All of the main distros keep up with Emacs releases with a lag of only a couple weeks.
Many provide a "bleeding edge" beta package as well.  The evidence is strong that Emacs is both a valuable package and one that is easy to keep up to date.  If Scientific Linux doesn't do so ....)

 > $ fc-list | grep -i "courier"
 > Courier:style=Regular
 > $ fc-list | grep -i helvetica
 > Helvetica:style=Regular

These are again fontconfig specs; since fontconfig finds these fonts, that's strong evidence that your Emacs is too old to render them.