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

If you want to use, say, α, then you need an actual α in the string, not an "a".

I don't know how the dingbats work, but certainly that's how it works
for characters that are in the unicode character set.

(You can type those characters by using their LaTeX equivalents and
then hitting control-\ or alt-\ (depending on the platform).)

Robby

On Fri, Nov 23, 2012 at 2:02 PM, Clement Erik Ferguson
<clementraphael at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>> >
>
>