(gimp:17860): Pango-WARNING **: shape engine failure, expect ugly output. the offending font is 'Verdana Not-Rotated 9.9990234375'

[Nick Law <nick law mic-nucmed co uk>]

> Hi Guys,
>
> I have the following message displayed in the console window when I 
> run gimp
>
> /(gimp:17860): Gtk-WARNING **: Unable to locate theme engine in 
> module_path: "qtengine",
>
> (gimp:17860): Pango-WARNING **: shape engine failure, expect ugly 
> output. the offending font is 'Verdana Not-Rotated 9.9990234375'
>
> /The second error is the one that I'm interested in as I thing it's 
> where the problem is . After having typed 'gimp' in the console window 
> the application starts and the usual dialogue boxes are displayed, 
> however two things are noticeable...
>
> - There's no text what so ever in any of the pull-down menus or along 
> the top of the dialogue box. There's no text in the help text or 
> anywhere.
> - You can click on the invisible text and a drop down menu appears 
> again it has no text , what's more the pull down area is expanded 
> hugely in a horizontal direction so that the sides of the menu are off 
> screen.
>
> If I remove the verdana fonts from the system ( they were only located 
> in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/truetype/ ) then the pango warning changes to
> /(gimp:17860): Pango-WARNING **: shape engine failure, expect ugly 
> output. the offending font is 'Ariel Not-Rotated 9.98............'
>
> /The problem isn't just gimp, but also AVG. However other applications 
> which I believe use GTK such as as firefox, thunderbird and audacity 
> are unaffected.
>
> This problem happened when I upgraded the following packages to their 
> latest versions..
>
> atk-1.9.1
> gtk+-2.10.6
> libpng-1.2.8
> pkg-config-0.20
> cairo-1.2.0
> gtk+-2.10.6
> pango-1.14.7
> tiff-3.7.4
> glib-2.12.4
> jpegsrc-6b
>
> The version of gimp I'm using is 2.2.4-3
>
> I also tried pango-1.15.0 but the same problem 'no text displayed in 
> the menus still exists' All these packages were compiled from source 
> with no errors.
>
> Having googled for this error their seem to be a number of people that 
> have this error, but none of the posts resulted in a solution.
>
> Is this a bug in pango ?
> Has anybody a solution ?
> Why do some gtk applications work and others not ?
>
> Any help would be much appreciated.
>
> Regards
> Nick Law