Liberation Sans Italic font not rendering properly on MATE DE

[daninsky]

(FreeFileSync_x86_64:138047): Pango-WARNING **: 18:34:23.188: failed to create cairo scaled font, expect ugly output. the offending font is 'Liberation Sans Italic 10.9990234375'
(FreeFileSync_x86_64:138047): Pango-WARNING **: 18:34:23.188: font_face status is: file not found
(FreeFileSync_x86_64:138047): Pango-WARNING **: 18:34:23.188: scaled_font status is: file not found


This warning arrise whenever is a widget trying to load and render a font and fails FFS.

Maybe it's a problem with MATE itself. The font is installed.

Work's normal on Cinnamon DE.

[bgstack15]

I am not an expert, but let's get some more details! Can you share your screen resolution in MATE, and if you are doing any software-based scaling (1.5x or 2x or something else)? Can you share your screen resolution in Cinnamon and scaling there too?

[Zenju]

We should be able to work around this issue: https://www.mediafire.com/file/ht5ot9zh47ypm2c/FreeFileSync_11.27_beta_Linux.tar%25282%2529.gz

[daninsky]

I am not an expert, but let's get some more details! Can you share your screen resolution in MATE, and if you are doing any software-based scaling (1.5x or 2x or something else)? Can you share your screen resolution in Cinnamon and scaling there too?

Both are 100% scale mode, 1920x1080 MATE, 1366x768 Cinnamon.

[daninsky]

We should be able to work around this issue: https://www.mediafire.com/file/ht5ot9zh47ypm2c/FreeFileSync_11.27_beta_Linux.tar%25282%2529.gz

11.27 has the same problem unfortunately.

[Zenju]

11.27 has the same problem unfortunately.

Very strange. There should be no difference to the font handling of the main window file listing now.

[bgstack15]

One possibility is that the different DEs are using different font files. That seems like quite a stretch, but we can bother to go down that lane if you wish. You will need to install strace. Because it is a command line utility, it might not appear in a graphical package manager. You should investigate using apt-get or yum or zypper or the other appropriate package manager for your distribution of Linux. The command will probably simply be sudo apt-get install strace.

Once you have strace, run the program with strace in a terminal.

$ strace /opt/FreeFileSync/FreeFileSync 2>&1 | grep -iE 'font'


Strace will show us the system calls FreeFileSync makes, that is, the commands it tells the kernel to do. I use strace when I want to see what files the program opens. In this case, we only care about any font files it looks for, so we are just searching (with grep) for "font." The 2 greater than-ampersand 1 sends the output of strace to the pipe so that grep can actually search its contents. This bit moves standard error (given a file number of 2 by default) to the same output as standard output (file number, or file descriptor 1), and standard output is what gets piped to the next program, which is grep.
Run this command inside each DE, and maybe perhaps we can learn if the fonts it loads are coming from different places.

When I run this program with strace, I see this entry (among others)

openat(AT_FDCWD, "/usr/share/fonts/truetype/liberation2/LiberationSans-Regular.ttf", O_RDONLY) = 7


Perhaps you have configured your MATE environment to use an italic font by default for everything? I have a LiberationSans-Italic.ttf but my FreeFileSync did not try to load it.

[daninsky]

One possibility is that the different DEs are using different font files. That seems like quite a stretch, but we can bother to go down that lane if you wish. You will need to install strace. Because it is a command line utility, it might not appear in a graphical package manager. You should investigate using apt-get or yum or zypper or the other appropriate package manager for your distribution of Linux. The command will probably simply be sudo apt-get install strace.

Once you have strace, run the program with strace in a terminal.

$ strace /opt/FreeFileSync/FreeFileSync 2>&1 | grep -iE 'font'


Strace will show us the system calls FreeFileSync makes, that is, the commands it tells the kernel to do. I use strace when I want to see what files the program opens. In this case, we only care about any font files it looks for, so we are just searching (with grep) for "font." The 2 greater than-ampersand 1 sends the output of strace to the pipe so that grep can actually search its contents. This bit moves standard error (given a file number of 2 by default) to the same output as standard output (file number, or file descriptor 1), and standard output is what gets piped to the next program, which is grep.
Run this command inside each DE, and maybe perhaps we can learn if the fonts it loads are coming from different places.

When I run this program with strace, I see this entry (among others)

openat(AT_FDCWD, "/usr/share/fonts/truetype/liberation2/LiberationSans-Regular.ttf", O_RDONLY) = 7


Perhaps you have configured your MATE environment to use an italic font by default for everything? I have a LiberationSans-Italic.ttf but my FreeFileSync did not try to load it.

This is nice, but I didn't see much, I searched for additional strace flags (strace -e trace=open,openat,close,read,write,connect,accept), but nothing special appeared either, the only thing I see is related with the font is the FFS stdout, the same what I showed.

[daninsky]

11.27 has the same problem unfortunately.

Very strange. There should be no difference to the font handling of the main window file listing now.

Sorry, was indeed corrected. I didn't mention that is another place that is broke that was looking, because my files was already in sync to see the sync dialog.
Synchronization Settings in the synchronization tab.

[daninsky]

Unfortunately mate has some problems besides the font, as you can see. But the fonts are a good fix.

[Zenju]

Sorry, was indeed corrected. I didn't mention that is another place that is broke that was looking, because my files was already in sync to see the sync dialog.
Synchronization Settings in the synchronization tab.

Should be fixed for the next release. The issues seem to be related to hard-coded values of the "Arial" font.