Re: xfig: Warning: Missing charsets in String to FontSet conversion

[Andy <AndyMHancock@gmail.com>]

Jack <ostroffjh <at> sbcglobal.net> writes:
>On 2013.02.04 10:26, Jon TURNEY wrote:
>>On 04/02/2013 00:11, Andy wrote:
>>> When I start xfig, I get the following:
>>>    Warning: Missing charsets in String to FontSet conversion
>>>    Warning: Missing charsets in String to FontSet conversion
>>>    Warning: Missing charsets in String to FontSet conversion
>>>    ^GCan't open compose key file '/usr/lib/xfig/CompKeyDB',
>>>       no multi-key sequences available
>>
>> Yes, this error message from libX11 is pretty bad, and should tell
>> you the charsets that are missing.
>>
>> If I recall correctly, this warning is usually caused when you are
>> using an UTF-8 locale (like the default C.UTF-8 locale), because
>> when making the fontset, libX11 searches for matching fonts with
>> all the encodings it knows about, and there are no matching fonts
>> with CJK encodings (as no CJK fonts are installed).
>>
>> Installing the fonts font-isas-misc, font-jis-misc and
>> font-daewoo-misc should work around the problem.
>>
>> You could also use a non-UTF-8 locale, but I wouldn't recommend
>> that.

I uninstalled xfig because I managed to solve my problem with Inkscape.  I'm not
trying to snub one vector drawing package over the other, just reporting what
happened.  I don't think I could have solved my particular problem with xfig
even in the absence of error messages because I would have to convert a PDF to
fig using pstoedit.  That conversion was problematic -- messages about missing
glyphs and unsupported fonts (I don't use CJK fonts, and the PDF did not contain
any Asian characters).

If I install xfig again and still encounter the messages in my original post,
I'll try installing the fonts you suggested.

> I'm getting the same three warnings, followed by
> Warning: Cannot convert string
> "-*-times-bold-r-normal--16-*-*-*-*-*-*-*,-*-*-bold-r
> -normal--16-*-*-*-*-*-*-*,-*-*-*-r-*--16-*-*-*-*-*-*-*"
> to type FontSet
>
> but not the compose key message.

I searched the Cygwin packages for CompKeyDB, and found that I needed to install
xfig-lib.  That caused the CompKeyDB message to go away.

> I already have those three fonts installed, and my locale is
> en_US.UTF-8.

Ah well.  Seems like it was a good attempt at guessing the cause, but those
fonts weren't the problem.

> I see some similar issues in the past in the list archive, including
> an unanswered post from Yaakov 17 Dec 2009 which looks exactly like
> this question.
>
> I've also seen posts suggsting other fonts or packages - none of
> which I see on cygwin, so I don't know if they're not available or
> just named differently.  (Examples include gsfonts-x11, xfonts-base,
> xfonts-encodings, xfonts-scalable)

Yes, I saw some of these as well, notably gsfonts-x11.  I didn't jump to the
conclusion that those particular fonts were my problem because they seem to vary
from situation to situation.  And, as you noted, gsfonts-x11 is not part of a
cygwin package (at least from a package search).

> Any other troubleshooting you can suggest?


--
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
Documentation:         http://x.cygwin.com/docs/
FAQ:                   http://x.cygwin.com/docs/faq/