Font previews look strange

[amirms]

Using Windows XP, when I type a text and try to change the font, some of the font previews look strange (Shapes instead of sample texts).

[Pablo Trabajos (pajarico)]

At a glance, I would say that those fonts lack some glyphs and that's why Inkscape uses squares as a substitution. This usually happens with fonts that haven't been designed to work on Latin texts, like asian or arabic typographies, or symbol fonts. Basically any font which lacks one of the characters shown on the correct examples in the list (look at Impact for example).

I can't test it because I don't have the fonts. Could you test if "Latha" or "Mangal" has the 'A' or 'a' characters? What version are you using?

[su_v (suv-lp)]

Closing due to lack of feedback. Feel free to reopen if you experience the same issues with font previews in current Inkscape versions (>= 0.48.x), and provide more details as requested in comment #2.