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Bug 3571 - X11 MessageBox doesn't work (can't load font) with UTF-8 system locale
Summary: X11 MessageBox doesn't work (can't load font) with UTF-8 system locale
Status: RESOLVED FIXED
Alias: None
Product: SDL
Classification: Unclassified
Component: video (show other bugs)
Version: 2.0.5
Hardware: x86_64 Linux
: P2 normal
Assignee: Sam Lantinga
QA Contact: Sam Lantinga
URL:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2017-01-27 19:45 UTC by Rémi Verschelde
Modified: 2017-01-28 19:14 UTC (History)
0 users

See Also:

Attachments
Proposed patch based on comment 2 (1.17 KB, patch)
2017-01-28 09:55 UTC, Rémi Verschelde 		Details | Diff
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Description Rémi Verschelde 2017-01-27 19:45:54 UTC 
I've noticed that SDL_ShowSimpleMessageBox doesn't work on my system (just returns -1 and "ERROR: Error Presenting MessageBox: No message system available".

I did some debugging (thanks to `./test/testmessage` which reproduces the issue for me) and narrowed it down to:
https://hg.libsdl.org/SDL/file/ca523d8f1af2/src/video/x11/SDL_x11messagebox.c#l197

```
static const char g_MessageBoxFontLatin1[] = "-*-*-medium-r-normal--0-120-*-*-p-0-iso8859-1";
static const char g_MessageBoxFont[] = "-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-*-*";

// [...]

data->font_set = X11_XCreateFontSet(data->display, g_MessageBoxFont,
                                    &missing, &num_missing, NULL);
```

This call returns that it can't load the font g_MessageBoxFont. If I replace it with g_MessageBoxFontLatin1, it works fine.
I do have xorg fonts installed. Tweaking g_MessageBoxFont to e.g. `"-*-*-medium-r-*--0-120-*-*-*-*-*-*"` also works for me, but I don't know how to compose those xorg font declarations properly.

The issue is reproducible only when using my system locale (fr_FR.UTF-8) or another installed locale (en_US.UTF-8). It can't be reproduced when using C or C.UTF-8.

I understand that this might be a distro issue we need to fix on our end, but I prefer to start reporting it here to get additional input about it.

System: Mageia 6 x86_64
Linux 4.9.6
X11 1.19.1
Comment 1 Sam Lantinga 2017-01-28 02:18:02 UTC 
Does it work to just have this?
"-*-*-*-*-*--*-120-*-*-*-*-*-*"

What about this?
"-*-*-*-*-*--0-120-*-*-*-*-*-*"

This is useful info about those font descriptions:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/X_Logical_Font_Description
Comment 2 Rémi Verschelde 2017-01-28 09:42:36 UTC 
Thanks for the resource, as always the Arch wiki is quite helpful :)

The two suggestions from comment 1 don't work for me. This seems to be the minimal working font description on my system:

(1) "-*-*-medium-*-*--*-120-*-*-*-*-*-*"

It however defaults to an italic font, and this the Arch wiki says for slant "Usually this needs to be specified.", I guess this would be better:

(2) "-*-*-medium-r-*--*-120-*-*-*-*-*-*"

For the next argument setwidth_name, the wiki mentions that "A value should be set, not wildcarded, when there are two or more possible values.", so maybe this would be better:

(3) "-*-*-medium-r-normal--*-120-*-*-*-*-*-*"

For this setup, xfontsel says that 374 names match on my system, so I suppose it's still generic enough to work on most systems. To compare with the Latin1 font used currently:

g_MessageBoxFontLatin1[] = "-*-*-medium-r-normal--0-120-*-*-p-0-iso8859-1";

So unless there's a strong reason not to specify the  weight_name, slant and setwidth_name, I guess the above proposal (3) would solve the bug for me (and hopefully not introduce regressions on other systems).
Comment 3 Rémi Verschelde 2017-01-28 09:43:16 UTC 
For the reference, here are the x11 font packs I have installed currently:

$ rpm -qa | grep x11-font | sort
x11-font-adobe-100dpi-1.0.3-6.mga6
x11-font-adobe-75dpi-1.0.3-6.mga6
x11-font-alias-1.0.3-7.mga6
x11-font-bh-100dpi-1.0.3-6.mga6
x11-font-bh-75dpi-1.0.3-6.mga6
x11-font-bh-lucidatypewriter-100dpi-1.0.3-6.mga6
x11-font-bh-lucidatypewriter-75dpi-1.0.3-6.mga6
x11-font-bitstream-100dpi-1.0.3-6.mga6
x11-font-bitstream-75dpi-1.0.3-6.mga6
x11-font-bitstream-type1-1.0.3-6.mga6
x11-font-cursor-misc-1.0.3-6.mga6
x11-font-daewoo-misc-1.0.3-6.mga6
x11-font-encodings-1.0.4-6.mga6
x11-font-isas-misc-1.0.3-6.mga6
x11-font-jis-misc-1.0.3-6.mga6
x11-font-misc-misc-1.1.2-6.mga6
x11-font-type1-1.0.0-13.mga6
x11-font-xfree86-type1-1.0.4-6.mga6

Out of those: http://madb.mageia.org/package/list/t_search/x11-font/release/cauldron/application/0
Comment 4 Rémi Verschelde 2017-01-28 09:55:56 UTC 
Created attachment 2689 [details]
Proposed patch based on comment 2
Comment 5 Sam Lantinga 2017-01-28 19:14:59 UTC 
Looks good, thanks!
https://hg.libsdl.org/SDL/rev/f8343b61abf7