[solved] fontforge seg faults on failure to find font

Question

I'm having what I suspect is a fairly standard problem but I've been unable to track it down using google, a forum search or the wiki.
Basically, fontforge seg faults on start. More specifically, it displays the dialog which allows me to select the font I want to open and then crashes. Starting the application from the command line produces this:
$ fontforge
Copyright (c) 2000-2012 by George Williams.
Executable based on sources from 14:57 GMT 31-Jul-2012-ML-D.
Library based on sources from 14:57 GMT 31-Jul-2012.
Help! Server claimed font
-adobe-courier std-medium-r-normal--16-0-0-0-m-0-iso10646-1
existed in the font list, but when I asked for it there was nothing.
I may crash soon.
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
I've tried fc-cache both with and without -f as both root and me. I've also tried moving ~/.fontconfig and ~/.config/fontconfig to backups and creating empty directories in their places. I've also recreated every fonts.dir and fonts.scale which locate can find on my system. I've also grepped "adobe-courier" in all of these files, all copies of fonts.alias found by locate and through /var/cache/fontconfig/* and not found any trace. I've examined (as best I can but this is not saying very much) the font config under /etc/fonts/.
The only even vaguely relevant information I've found references a fedora/red hat bug from two or three years ago and those bugs were marked as solved by updates and closed in fedora 10/11.  (Fedora is currently at 17.) Moreover, the problems there were traced to fonts.{dir,scale} not being updated and I've recreated all of these files as found by locate so they should all be current.
I'm sure I'm missing the stunningly obvious. Can anybody tell me where this reference might be coming from? Or otherwise suggest what I'm missing?
I haven't needed fontforge for a while so I don't know when it ceased to work and this is not helping with troubleshooting.
Last edited by cfr (2012-12-14 00:11:37)

Answer 1

The error may be caused by a bad entry in a fonts.dir file in one of your font directories. This file is used by an older method than fontconfig to index fonts for apps in X.
I would use 'locate' to find all files named fonts.dir. (There is probably a better way to find these files than 'locate'). When the files are found, 'grep' can be used to find the one with the bad entry. The following line of combined commands should work:
$ for file in $(locate fonts.dir); do grep -l 'adobe-courier std' $file; done
Then navigate to that file's directory and run:
$ mkfontscale
$ mkfontdir
Finally, as root, run
# xset fp rehash
See https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fo … plications.