Pango-WARNING **: failed to choose a font, expect ugly output

Question

I'm getting this error when starting anything that uses the Pango library. I'm using Kubuntu 9.10. I've done 'sudo apt-get --reinstall install' on libgtk* libcairo* libpango* and fontconfig, with no luck.

Could someone point me in the right direction? Thanks.

Mychael

Answer 1

I did a lot of searching on this and never found a decent answer. My issue involved running virt-manager (an xwindows based utility) on a remote server. I have all the fonts on my xwindows box but not on the remote host.

the i ran 'yum install xorg-x11-font*' on the remote host everything worked fine.

Regardless

Thanks - I was setting up a minimal machine without a full desktop, but with a couple of X-apps. This was exactly what I needed. – Weaks

Thanks! On CentOS I had to install:xorg-x11-fonts-Type1. Also installed xorg-x11-fonts-100dpi and xorg-x11-fonts-75dpi -- not sure which I needed, if either. – Billiton

Answer 2

I ran into this on Amazon Linux, with the minimal set of X packages necessary to run vncserver, and had to install dejavu-sans-fonts and dejavu-serif-fonts.

Foreyard

This fixed it for me on RHEL/CentOS 6. Thanks! – Hecto

Answer 3

Verify font file permissions, especially on fonts you have installed manually, such as: out of package management scope.

Pango may fail with this error when the font is not readable by the desktop user. Example: font installed under /usr/share/fonts/..., owned by root, no others have read rights.

Suki

Answer 4

Your fonts are probably installed in /usr/X11R6/share/fonts but since pango-1.24 the fonts should be in /usr/share/fonts. The solution is to link the X11 fonts:

ln -s /usr/X11R6/share/fonts /usr/share

This should fix the problem.

Aramaic

I don't have a permission to do that. How do I tell pango to look for the fonts in ~/tmp/share/fonts? – Spake

Answer 5

Make sure that font you are using with pango is installed on the machine.

Check for installed fonts in /usr/share/fonts directory.

To install new fonts try the steps mentioned in this document:

Replevin