[ILUG] Dingbats font in X

[Niall O Broin]

I was reading a PDF manual this morning and I got this error

Failed to open font: '-*-zapfdingbats-medium-r-normal-*-18-*-*-*-*-*-*-*'

in the xterm from which I had launched xpdf.

I quit xpdf, started xfstt (I really must integrate that into my startup)
and tried again but still no joy. A quick xlsfonts and then I saw tha
although I had webdings and wingdings, there was no zapfdingbats. So a
surfing I did go and found a Zapfdingbats TrueType font, but that still
doesn't work, probably because its font name is listed as zapfdingbats bt
rather than simply zapfdingbats .

I tried to investigate this a little further and it became even weirder. I
now have three *ding* TrueType fonts but none of them will work in X.
xlsfonts lists them, but xlsfonts -l -fn XXX doesn't - you must use -o as
mentioned in the xlsfonts man page.

Any of these fonts may be opened in xfd but it doesn't show any glyphs -
just squares in positions 0-31 and the rest are empty. If you use e.g. gimp
and choose this font, you can't get any text, no matter what key you press.

Note that the above are not problems with TrueType fonts - 'normal' TrueType
fonts such as Verdana display fine in xfd or the Gimp.

So there you have it - XF86 3.3.6 and xfstt and TrueType *ding* fonts -
what's the story.



Regards,



Niall