Re: PangoWarning: failed to choose a font with 'PangoRenderWin32' renderer

[John Emmas <johne53 tiscali co uk>]

Hello Andreas,

My experiences are actually with C++ but the first time I built a GTK app using Pango I had exactly the same problem and it took ages to figure out.  Here are some of the lessons I learned though....

I'm not sure if it's Pango itself or if it's something else that affects Pango (GTK maybe) - but for Win32 builds, your application's "exe" file is expected to be in a folder called "bin".  The "pangorc" file is expected to be in a folder called "etc/pango" which is a subdirectory of the directory where "pango.dll" is installed.  If your pango DLL isn't called "pango.dll" (which mine wasn't) "pangorc" is expected to be in the folder "../etc/pango" (i.e. a subdirectory of your "bin" folder's parent directory).  It's all pretty confusing.

As an example, if you're currently building your exe target into "C:\Program Files\my_app" you'll need to change that to be "C:\Program Files\my_app\bin".  You'll then need to create the following folder:-

C:\Program Files\my_app\etc\pango

and make sure it contains these files:-

pangorc
pango.modules
pangox.aliases

"pango.modules" then needs to contain the correct paths to wherever your pango module files are located.

I have to confess that I'm not at all familiar with PyGTK (or even with Python) so forgive me if you already know all this or if none of it is relevant to PyGTK.  As I said earlier, my comments are based on my C++ builds.  However, I do remember that when it came to pango's modules, their physical locations are very critical.  I suspect that this will almost certainly be the explanation for your problem.  For C++ there's also a "config.h" file which needs to be set up correctly, though that might not apply in your case.

Ultimately though, as Behdad suggested, you might need to build everything from source and debug it yourself.  That's what I had to do eventually.  There's no way I'd have found any of this out otherwise.

John