Re: missing glyphs

[Jan de Groot <jan jgc homeip net>]

On Fri, 2006-10-27 at 18:01 -0600, Larry Hunter wrote:
> Folks,
> 
> I'm running epipany 2.14.3 using the “gecko-1.8” backend (as packaged
> for a debian distribution, 2.14.3-2).  I'm running the latest Debian
> unstable distribution on an AMD64 platform (x86_64). 
> 
> For some reason, there are missing glyphs in just about all the fonts as
> rendered in epiphany.   For example, looking at a NY Times page in its
> native fonts
> (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/27/washington/27cnd-lobby.html) all the
> dashes, quotations, etc. are rendered as missing glyph boxes.  I know
> the fonts are OK because the same page renders fine with, say, Mozilla
> 1.7.13 (debian package 1.7.13-0.3).   The same glyphs are missing if I
> force it to use other fonts (I tried quite a few). 
> 
> Any ideas about how to debug (or better, fix) this? 

This is probably due to the fact that you have disabled bitmap fonts
using fontconfig on your system, while your truetype fonts don't provide
glyphs for the "special" chars. The first step you could take is to
install dejavu fonts instead of bitstream vera, the 2nd step would be to
enable bitmap fonts again.
Enabling bitmap fonts will result in jagged fonts on quite some pages,
as many websites list "Courier", "Times" or "Helvetica" as fonts. Using
the fontconfig conf.d file found at [1] these will get rewritten to
"monospace", "serif" and "sans-serif", which results in getting truetype
fonts.

[1]
http://cvs.archlinux.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/lib/fontconfig/30-replace-bitmap-fonts.conf?rev=1.1