From gavin.simpson at ucl.ac.uk  Thu Aug 19 13:26:50 2010
From: gavin.simpson at ucl.ac.uk (Gavin Simpson)
Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2010 12:26:50 +0100
Subject: [Rd] One possible cause for incorrect symbols in X11() output
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.2.00.1008190738170.362@gannet.stats.ox.ac.uk>
References: <alpine.LFD.2.00.1008190738170.362@gannet.stats.ox.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <1282217210.2565.39.camel@localhost>

On Thu, 2010-08-19 at 07:55 +0100, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
> There have been spasmodic reports of symbols such as pi and infinity 
> in plotmath being reproduced incorrectly on the X11 device on some 
> Linux systems (at least Ubuntu 10 and Fedora 12/13), and we've managed 
> to track down one cause whilst investigating PR#14355.
> 
> Some systems have Wine and hence the Wine symbol font installed. 
> 'fontconfig', which is used by cairographics in X11(type='cairo') and 
> many other applications, prefers the Wine symbol font to the standard 
> Type 1 URW font, and seems to misinterpret its encoding.
> 
> You may well have Wine installed without realizing it (as I did) -- it 
> is increasingly common as a dependency of other software. The best 
> test is to run
> 
> % fc-match symbol
> s050000l.pfb: "Standard Symbols L" "Regular"
> 
> This is the result on a system without Wine: if you see
> 
> % fc-match symbol
> symbol.ttf: "Symbol" "Regular"
> 
> you at least potentially have the problem.  A good test is to look at 
> ?points and run the function TestChars() defined there as
> 
> TestChars(font=5)
> 
> If you do have the problem, a workaround is to add the following lines 
> to ~/.fonts.conf or /etc/fonts/local.conf (which you may need to 
> create):
> 
> <match target="pattern">
>    <test name="family"><string>Symbol</string></test>
>    <edit name="family" mode="prepend" binding="same">
>      <string>Standard Symbols L</string>
>    </edit>
> </match>
> 
> and repeat the fc-match test to check that it worked.

Hi,

I tried the suggested change to ~/.fonts.conf but am getting an error
from fontconfig:

$ fc-match symbol
Fontconfig error: "~/.fonts.conf", line 10: junk after document element
s050000l.pfb: "Standard Symbols L" "Regular"
$ cat ~/.fonts.conf
<match target="pattern">
        <test name="family">
                <string>Symbol</string>
        </test>
        <edit name="family" mode="prepend" binding="same">
                <string>Standard Symbols L</string>
        </edit>
</match>

<alias binding="same">
       <family>ZapfDingbats</family>
       <accept><family>Dingbats</family></accept>
</alias>

I have an alias in there to solve the "q" symbol being used in Evince
etc in place of pch == 1.

Am I inserting this incorrectly?

Many thanks,

G

> 
> (This workaround was culled from
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/fontconfig/+bug/551977
> )
> 

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[Rd] One possible cause for incorrect symbols in X11() output
Gavin Simpson