Scrambled Fonts in Firefox 3 and Gimp after TT Font Installation

[bobp]

After installing some TT Fonts from my Windows box, the fonts in Firefox 3B5 and Gimp 2.4 are scrambled. In the Gimp, all of the text characters have been replaced by small rectangles. In Firefox, all of the menu selections are invisible. All of the menus appear to have no characters.

When running these programs from the command line, I get Pango Warnings that Pango failed to create a cairo scaled font. Reinstalling doesn't help. Deleting the configuration files for the applications doesn't help. Deleting the offending font doesn't help either -- the same problem just crops up again with another font name.

I am using Kubuntu 8.04 LTS.

[Dereck Wonnacott (dereck)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Unfortunately we can't fix it, because your description didn't include enough information. You may find it helpful to read "How to report bugs effectively" [WWW] http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html. We'd be grateful if you would then provide a more complete description of the problem.

We have instructions on debugging some types of problems at [WWW] http://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingProcedures

At a minimum, we need:
1. the specific steps or actions you took that caused you to encounter the problem,
2. the behavior you expected, and
3. the behavior you actually encountered (in as much detail as possible).
Thanks!

[bobp (custom-basses)]

1. Open Firefox 3 Beta 5 browser via the command line:
<snip>
bob@todland:~$ firefox
</snip>

2. Expect normal behavior.

3. Firefox has no fonts in its menus. The following info appears in the console:
<snip>

(firefox:5877): Pango-WARNING **: failed to create cairo scaled font, expect ugly output. the offending font is 'Bitstream Vera Sans 9'

(firefox:5877): Pango-WARNING **: failed to create cairo scaled font, expect ugly output. the offending font is 'Bitstream Vera Sans 9'

(firefox:5877): Pango-WARNING **: shaping failure, expect ugly output. shape-engine='BasicEngineFc', font='Bitstream Vera Sans 9', text='English Hello'
</snip>

[bobp (custom-basses)]

Same behavior with the Gimp:

1. Start it from the command line in a console window
2. Expect normal behavior
3. No text characters are observable in the program. Each text character has been replaced with a little square.

Console output:

bob@todland:~$ gimp

(gimp:6024): Pango-WARNING **: failed to create cairo scaled font, expect ugly output. the offending font is 'Bitstream Vera Sans Bold 9'

(gimp:6024): Pango-WARNING **: failed to create cairo scaled font, expect ugly output. the offending font is 'Bitstream Vera Sans Bold 9'

(gimp:6024): Pango-WARNING **: shaping failure, expect ugly output. shape-engine='BasicEngineFc', font='Bitstream Vera Sans Bold 9', text='English Hello'

(gimp:6024): Pango-WARNING **: failed to create cairo scaled font, expect ugly output. the offending font is 'Bitstream Vera Sans 9'

(gimp:6024): Pango-WARNING **: failed to create cairo scaled font, expect ugly output. the offending font is 'Bitstream Vera Sans 9'

(gimp:6024): Pango-WARNING **: shaping failure, expect ugly output. shape-engine='BasicEngineFc', font='Bitstream Vera Sans 9', text='English Hello'

(gimp:6024): Pango-WARNING **: failed to create cairo scaled font, expect ugly output. the offending font is 'Bitstream Vera Sans Oblique 9'

(gimp:6024): Pango-WARNING **: shaping failure, expect ugly output. shape-engine='BasicEngineFc', font='Bitstream Vera Sans Oblique 9', text='You can drop dockable dialogs here'

[bobp (custom-basses)]

Bump. doesn't anyone care?

[bobp (custom-basses)]

bump

[Peter Klemm (pete-klemm)]

I have the same issue with Iceweasel 3.0.1 on Debian. Did you ever get the problem solved?

My output:

(firefox-bin:4677): Pango-WARNING **: shaping failure, expect ugly output. shape-engine='BasicEngineFc', font='Arial 14.625', text='English Hello'

(firefox-bin:4677): Pango-WARNING **: shaping failure, expect ugly output. shape-engine='BasicEngineFc', font='Arial 18.701171875', text=' '

(firefox-bin:4677): Pango-WARNING **: failed to create cairo scaled font, expect ugly output. the offending font is 'Verdana Italic 12.466796875'

[Peter Klemm (pete-klemm)]

Solved the problem by running the following:

dpkg-reconfigure libcairo2 libpango1.0-common
fc-cache -fs
update-pangox-aliases

[Michele Mangili (mangilimic)]

This bug report is being closed due to your last comment regarding this being fixed with an update. For future reference you can manage the status of your own bugs by clicking on the current status in the yellow line and then choosing a new status in the revealed drop down box. You can learn more about bug statuses at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Status . Thank you again for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Feel free to submit any future bugs you may find.