Emacs 20.7 and Mule: no Big5 fonts

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Newsgroups: comp.emacs

> I'm running Emacs 20.7 with Mule, on Redhat 7.0, and I believe I have all
> the appropriate fonts in the right places.  I've been able to get correct
> font display for Cyrillic, Japanese, and simplified Chinese, but I cannot
> get any traditional Chinese displayed.  (There are some other fonts that
> don't seem to be working like Vietnamese and Devangarani but traditional
> Chinese is what I care about right now.)  I do have the taipei16.pcf and
> taipei24.pcf fonts installed, in
>
> /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/intlfonts-1.2/Chinese/
> /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/chinese/
> /usr/local/share/emacs/fonts/bdf/
> /usr/local/share/emacs/fonts/
>
> What should I be doing to get these fonts displayed?
>
> (I also have the same font problems under Netscape, too.)

If you are also having problems with Netscape, that suggests that the problems are with your X configuration. Take a look in your /var/log/XFree86.0.log file and make sure that the chinese font directories are successfully added to the font list. If they don't appear in the log, check the /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 file and make sure that in Section "Files" … EndSection there are the following lines

FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/intlfonts-1.2/Chinese/"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/chinese/"
FontPath "/usr/local/share/emacs/fonts/bdf/"
FontPath "/usr/local/share/emacs/fonts/"

and restart the X server (log out and back in should be enough). If you edit this config file *Back it up* before you save over the older working version. Its embarrassing to lose your X server because you mess up its configuration :-)

If you are still having problems, look at that log file again. If the font paths are being rejected by XFree86 it is likely that the directories have not been set up correctly. Go into each font directory that fails and make sure that the file 'fonts.dir' exists and has the correct entries in it. If it does not exist, or is empty or suspect, generate a new one by typing

mkfontdir > fonts.dir

Then restart the X server again and cross your fingers.

Toby Haynes

Emacs 20.7 and Mule: no Big5 fonts

That did it! The following paths were deleted from the font path:

/usr/local/share/emacs/fonts/bdf/
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/intlfonts-1.2/Chinese/

but the other two stayed. Now I have beautiful traditional Chinese fonts.

However, for some reason having

/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/intlfonts-1.2/Chinese/

on the fontpath causes the X server to crash when I point Netscape at a Big5 page. So I took it off. Netscape runs fine now, though off of the Emacs .pcf fonts. Are these fonts any different than the .bdf fonts?

Emacs 20.7 and Mule: no Big5 fonts

> There is another strangeness that may be related: when I run
>
>   locate taipei
>
> it doesn't return the file
>
> /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/chinese/taipei16.bdf
>
> even though it does return
>
> /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/chinese/taipei24.bdf
>
> and the taipei16.bdf file is sitting right in the same directory with the
> same permissions.

If this is a command called `locate' you invoke from the shell prompt, then it doesn't look for files on disk. Instead, it consults a database created by the updatedb script (it's supposed to be run either by a cron job, or by you manually once in a while).