Win32: hebrew fonts displayed incorrectly in text window

[Preacher-mg]

When editing hebrew text, the text input field in the text
and font window appears as a series of squares instead
of the hebrew characters.

Apparently this is a result of using a font for the
menu/interface that does not have hebrew characters.
Changing the font definition in etc/gtk-2.0/gtkrc to a
different font solved it.
However not all users can be expected to find this out
for themselves - some tool/patch/readme is needed, or a
different font needs to be used.

[Kees Cook (kees)]

Can you describe how to test/fix this?

- what locale you're using
- what font name you're using
- how to fix the gtkrc to make it work

I'm not sure where to start. :) Thanks!

[Mental-users (mental-users)]

Hmm, ideally Pango should be automatically doing font
substitution if it can't find the right glyph in the normal
font. This might be an upstream bug for the Win32 Pango
backend.

[Dov Grobgeld (dov-grobgeld)]

I was just going to file this bug, when I found this bug report.

The problem is that gtkrc defines an explicit Win32 font
instead of using one of the fontconfig fonts as follows:

   gtk-font-name="verdana 9"

I don't understand why the unknown glyphs are not filled in
according to the "sans" font though.

There are two possible ways of solving this bug:

1. Erase the font definition all together from gtkrc

2. Change the font definition to:

    gtk-font-name= "sans 9"

If, for whatever unknown reason, you explicitely want
"verdana" for sans, then the proper place is to declare it
in the

     .../inkscape/etc/fonts.conf

file, or in local.conf in the same directory.

It has been verified that this solution solves the boxes for
Hebrew problem in the GtkEntry and GtkTextViewer.

Of course, I don't understand why inkscape must include its
own gtk tree, instead of just relying on the same gtk
installation as e.g. gimp...