bug#33996: Icecat is missing fonts

bug#33996: Icecat is missing fonts

[swedebugia]

Hi

After installing Icecat on guixsd v0.16 and starting it it shows only
squares instead of text and pango warns "missing font nimbus ..."

I think we should add font-gnu-freefont-ttf to the input of icecat to
fix this to make it work out of the box.

If on a foreign distribution guix should of course also notice if the
correct XDG-env variables are missing when installing icecat and hint.

-- 
Cheers 
Swedebugia

bug#33996: Icecat is missing fonts

[Adonay Felipe Nogueira]

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Em 06/01/2019 08:31, swedebugia@riseup.net escreveu:
> After installing Icecat on guixsd v0.16 and starting it it shows only
> squares instead of text and pango warns "missing font nimbus ..."

This behavior seems similar to what I experience while using Guix in
Trisquel 8.0
Flidas. The problem doesn't cause squares to appear, it actually causes
the last text font that fontconfig advertises to IceCat, to be selected.

I don't know how fontconfig selects these fonts, but I noticed that you
can test this by placing some font in "~/.local/share/fonts" and running
`fc-cache -vf'. IceCat should pick that font. You might need to try with
different fonts, as IceCat seems to expect from fontconfig that it
selects fonts with specific properties.



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bug#33996: Is it hard to fix this problem?

[Tadeus Prastowo]

I just downloaded v0.16 and installed it on the bare hardware using
the minimal desktop configuration (the one whose example includes
`ratpoison').

After `guix package -i icecat', running it will show boxes as reported
by the OP.  I confirm that OP's solution of `guix package -i
font-gnu-freefont-ttf' fixes this problem.  Can't this be fixed at its
root, please?  It has been two months.

Thank you.

--
Best regards,
Tadeus

bug#33996: Is it hard to fix this problem?

[swedebugia]

On 2019-03-23 01:00, Tadeus Prastowo wrote:
> I just downloaded v0.16 and installed it on the bare hardware using
> the minimal desktop configuration (the one whose example includes
> `ratpoison').
> 
> After `guix package -i icecat', running it will show boxes as reported
> by the OP.  I confirm that OP's solution of `guix package -i
> font-gnu-freefont-ttf' fixes this problem.  Can't this be fixed at its
> root, please?  It has been two months.

This is definitely not hard :)

Would you like to submit a patch with font-gnu-freefont-ttf as input (or 
maybe propagated input?) to icecat?

I did not do it for various reasons one being that testing the patch 
requires building icecat.

-- 
Cheers
Swedebugia

bug#33996: Is it hard to fix this problem?

[Ricardo Wurmus]

swedebugia <swedebugia@riseup.net> writes:

> Would you like to submit a patch with font-gnu-freefont-ttf as input
> (or maybe propagated input?) to icecat?

Let’s not rush to conclusions.  We usually don’t add fonts to inputs
unless they are required at build time.

As far as I’m aware of the problem was that XDG environment variables
were not set (or the executables were not sufficiently wrapped).  Has
this been confirmed yet?

Users should be free to pick whatever font they want – or choose to not
install any additional fonts.

-- 
Ricardo