[racket] text/font not rendering symbol fonts on WinXP

From: Clement Erik Ferguson (clementraphael at gmail.com)
Date: Fri Nov 23 15:02:42 EST 2012

Now I'm experiencing the same problem in Ubuntu 12.10. No symbol fonts
render when using text/font; I only get the latin text equivalent. I tried
this using the Dingbats font built into Ubuntu along with custom symbol
fonts I had downloaded. Both Dingbats and the other symbol fonts I
downloaded work fine in other programs.

The system where this did work correctly was an Ubuntu 12.04 machine
(running under a VM). The Ubuntu 12.10 machine I'm using now is a fresh OS
installation using the 64-bit binary downloaded from the Racket site.

Is anyone else using Ubuntu 12.10? Can you try running the following code?

(require 2htdp/image)
(text/font "test" FONT-SIZE "black" "Dingbats" 'symbol 'normal 'normal #f)

This should render some triangles and a snowflake, not "test".

Thanks!

On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 1:54 PM, Robby Findler
<robby at eecs.northwestern.edu>wrote:

> The text/font function ultimately just calls find-or-create-font with
> the font details and then draw-string on the dc<%> with the string, so
> I guess that this is either a problem at that level of the Racket GUI
> system, or something that is just different about how Windows works
> from other platforms. (Sorry I don't know the right answer here.)
>
> Robby
>
> On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 12:29 PM, Clement Erik Ferguson
> <clementraphael at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I'm a newcomer to Racket and I ran into a problem with the text/font
> > function in 2htdp/image. stamourv on #racket helped me diagnose this,
> and it
> > seems to be a problem confined to Windows XP. When using text/font with a
> > symbol font like Wingdings or Symbol (standard symbol fonts included with
> > Windows) the character is not rendered. Instead, I get whatever the
> > equivalent Roman character would be.
> >
> > For instance:
> >
> > (define testingfont
> >   (text/font "012abc" 36 "black"
> >              "Wingdings" 'default 'normal 'normal #f))
> >
> > If I then type testingfont into the interactions window, instead of
> > rendering a series of symbols I get the input string 012abc instead. I
> also
> > tried using 'symbol instead of 'default. We tried the same code on Debian
> > (stamourv) and Ubuntu (me) and it worked fine on those platforms.
> >
> > I'm running Windows XP 32-bit, and I am using Racket 5.3.1.
> >
> > Thanks!
> >
> > ____________________
> >   Racket Users list:
> >   http://lists.racket-lang.org/users
> >
>
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