Broken fonts for Gtk based applications

[Václav Haisman]

After upgrade from 12.10 to 13.04 beta of Ubuntu (Xubuntu), I am experiencing some issues. Like without me actually changing anything, my fonts are broken for some applications (most of them) and not for other (rxvt).

See this http://i.imgur.com/ubVvr53.png

As you can see, rxvt there is the only application with normal fonts. The Terminal application from Xfce suite is for some inexplicable reason using some kind of proportional font. See that the font in the Terminal Preferences is set to Liberation Mono. Also, please notice how in the Choose Terminal Font dialog the Courier New font Preview is not Courier New.

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

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[Václav Haisman (vzeman79)]

It is impossible for me to fill this against any concrete package as it seems that (nearly) all fonts functionality is broken. The issue is not recognizably localized.

[Václav Haisman (vzeman79)]

It appears that this issue plagues all Gtk based applications.

[Václav Haisman (vzeman79)]

When I try to open some PDF documents using Evince, I can see this on console:

(evince:10348): Pango-WARNING **: failed to create cairo scaled font, expect ugly output. the offending font is 'Linux Libertine G Italic 10.798828125'

(evince:10348): Pango-WARNING **: font_face status is: <unknown error status>

(evince:10348): Pango-WARNING **: scaled_font status is: out of memory

** (evince:10348): WARNING **: Exception in gr::RangeSegment for PangoLogAttrs

** (evince:10348): WARNING **: Exception in gr::RangeSegment

(evince:10348): Pango-WARNING **: failed to create cairo scaled font, expect ugly output. the offending font is 'Linux Libertine G Italic 9.75'

(evince:10348): Pango-WARNING **: font_face status is: <unknown error status>

(evince:10348): Pango-WARNING **: scaled_font status is: out of memory

** (evince:10348): WARNING **: Exception in gr::RangeSegment for PangoLogAttrs

** (evince:10348): WARNING **: Exception in gr::RangeSegment

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Vitali Chaplenko (norkolt)]

Try removing pango-graphite it seems broken in 13.04

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Václav Haisman (vzeman79)]

Removing package pango-graphite has solved the problem, it seems.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Raül Cambeiro (raulcambeiro)]

The suggestion in comment #10 works for me. Getting rid of pango-graphite fixes it.

Thanks Václav! This has been keeping me busy for a few hours.

I've just upgraded from 12.10 to 13.04. The problem also affected fonts in lightdm greeter and gnome, but fontconfig seemed ok and the fonts in tty1-6 were also ok.

[Karolis (reklamukibiras)]

I don't know about fonts - it seems fine to me, but I have rather more serious bug than fonts:
gtk application are not running at all! I didn't change anything since upgrade (and a while before), I use gthumb and evince quite frequently I never had any problems, but since upgrade both programs are not running at all, they don't show up any temporary/permanently-hanged windows - nothing. running in terminal shows this:

(gthumb:25574): GLib-GIO-ERROR **: No GSettings schemas are installed on the system
Trace/breakpoint trap

(evince:25547): GLib-GIO-ERROR **: No GSettings schemas are installed on the system
Trace/breakpoint trap

identical errors with echo $? = 133

-----------------------

And while writting this post - I found the sollution:
sudo apt-get install --reinstall libglib2.0-0
and both programs run (thank me, google, luck & the force :])

[Scott Adams (scottadams80)]

Took me forever to try and figure out why my fonts looked so bad in eclipse on kubuntu 13.04.

sudo apt-get remove pango-graphite

And now everything looks good again.

Thanks Vitali!

[Rockwalrus (rockwalrus)]

This is definitely a serious bug with pango-graphite in this release.

[Václav Haisman (vzeman79)]

Is this still relevant with 13.10?

[Václav Haisman (vzeman79)]

Answering myself after testing it: Yes, it is still broken.

[Alberto Salvia Novella (es20490446e)]

Since the affected package is "pango-graphite", it isn't "gtk".

[Václav Haisman (vzeman79)]

I have created upstream bug report: https://sourceforge.net/p/silgraphite/bugs/57/

[mhosken (martin-hosken)]

pango-graphite and its dependent libgraphite3 should be removed from any dependencies and from the repos. The replacement (libgraphite2-3, yeh I know it's a funny order) integrates with harfbuzz-ng. I'm assuming that pango uses harfbuzz rather than its own shaping modules now?

I don't know the procedure to withdraw a package from the repos from a particular release but I would suggest withdrawing pango-graphite and libgraphite3 from raring, saucy and subsequent releases.

[Ogilvierothchild (ogilvierothchild)]

This package was somehow auto-installed in a release upgrade today from 14.04 to 14.10, and cost me most of the day trying to figure out why everything in X was glitchy and crashing. The terminal looked like
http://askubuntu.com/questions/285836/letter-spacing-in-gnome-terminal

Even xterm would crash on ctrl-right-click, and these badly-spaced strange characters appeared in almost every terminal emulator (xterm worked, except for its menus). Font selection dialogs ground the computer to a halt, and even the window manager titlebars were in a wonky font. Yet, something was showing, so it was a lot of work to investigate the entire stack of X11, Xft, fontconfig, freetype, pango, gtk, etc to find what component was bad.

sudo apt-get purge pango-graphite

solved the problem. No idea how that package got installed, but it's removal fixed everything immediately. There is a serious problem with this package in the 14.10 release of ubuntu as well.

[Ogilvierothchild (ogilvierothchild)]

Given that this package breaks the entire desktop in a non-obvious way, the priority should be "high". I'm a software developer and have used linux as my daily OS since 1993 and it took me several hours to figure out what was going wrong.

What are novice users going to do, other than install another OS, if this bug strikes them? This bug makes all of X totally unusable.