Thanks for your reply Wouter. "fc-list" give me 208 entries, and "fc-match Sans" returns 'albw.ttf: "Albany AMT" "Regular"' So it looks like the fonts are installed. Googling this error, some people reported that running "pango-querymodules" fixed the problem for them, but it hasn't worked for me. Bill Wouter Bolsterlee wrote: Op zaterdag 19-09-2009 om 17:27 uur [tijdzone -0700], schreef William C. Nelson:For every one of my gnome programs, no text appears in menus or dialog boxes or pretty much anywhere, and I see the following messages: (evince:14812): Pango-WARNING **: failed to choose a font, expect ugly output. engine-type='PangoRenderFc', script='common' (evince:14812): Pango-CRITICAL **: pango_cairo_show_glyph_string: assertion `PANGO_IS_CAIRO_FONT (font)' failed Can anyone explain what is happening, and how I can get my system text back?It looks like you don't have any fonts installed on your system. Perhaps your system is broken? You can try "fc-list" in a terminal to list all fonts; there should be quite a few under normal circumstances. You may also try "fc-match Sans" (with a capital S) to query the default font. — Wouter -- ----------------------------------------------------- William C. Nelson, PhD Research Asst Professor University of Southern California, College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, Department of Biological Sciences, Marine Environmental Biology Division, Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies 310-510-4097 wcnelson usc edu |