[comp.unix.aix] X weirdness under 3.1.5

brazile@soir.bbn.com (Robert Brazile) (05/30/91)

Am I the only one for whom fonts don't work correctly? I have a 6000
with both an 8-bit color card and a 24-bit color card. When running
the 3003 X server on the 8-bit card, I could not use any application
that used fixed-width fonts (such as Courier). They would display each
character as if the server and the application had different ideas about
the height of the character, so for "a" I would see all of an "a" and part
of a "b" (obviously getting the next character in the font). This
tended to make things unreadable.

When I switched to the 24-bit card, things worked more-or-less
properly, and I was able to run (gnu) emacs and other programs I need
to do my work. The server on the 24-bit card had other problems, but
nothing I couldn't live with.

I had hopes that with 3005, these bugs would be fixed. Well, the
problem persists with the server running on the 8-bit card, and now
the 24-bit version is broken! Not as bad, mind you, but I can no
longer see underscores in the Courier fonts. This makes looking at C
source a real adventure.

It may be a library-server disagreement, as clients distributed with
the system don't seem to have the same problem. I'm just a little
puzzled as to why I don't anyone else mentioning this difficulty.

While I'm here, does anyone know how to get aixterm to stop turning my
Delete keysyms into "ESC [ P"s? I've tried mucking with the
translation tables to no effect; perhaps I'm doing it wrong. It was
working fine (Delete == ASCII DEL) with 3003, it's just now broken in
3005.

One last comment: I *really* wish (X-based) info wouldn't call xrdb
WITHOUT the -merge flag. I get tired of all of my Xdefaults
disappearing just because I had to look at a man page.

Robert Brazile
Bolt Beranek and Newman
brazile@diamond.bbn.com

andreess@mrlaxs.mrl.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen) (05/31/91)

In article <BRAZILE.91May30093302@soir.bbn.com> brazile@soir.bbn.com (Robert Brazile) writes:
>One last comment: I *really* wish (X-based) info wouldn't call xrdb
>WITHOUT the -merge flag. I get tired of all of my Xdefaults
>disappearing just because I had to look at a man page.

Actually, I believe (no promises) that xmodmap is the correct call
(which is to say, it works for me).

Marc

-- 
Marc Andreessen___________University of Illinois Materials Research Laboratory
Internet: andreessen@uimrl7.mrl.uiuc.edu____________Bitnet: andreessen@uiucmrl

ejk@ux2.cso.uiuc.edu (Ed Kubaitis - CSO ) (05/31/91)

  |>One last comment: I *really* wish (X-based) info wouldn't call xrdb
  |>WITHOUT the -merge flag. I get tired of all of my Xdefaults
  |>disappearing just because I had to look at a man page.
  |
  |Actually, I believe (no promises) that xmodmap is the correct call
  |(which is to say, it works for me).

It didn't work on non-IBM servers at 3003. Here's a 5 week old posting about
it:

 | ||> |> We're having trouble when we run info on platforms other than the
 | ||> |> 6000s - info will come up and be useable, but somehow (xmodmap call in
 | ||> |> /usr/bin/info?) the keyboard mapping gets seriously wedged (remapped),
 | ||> |> making the X session useless thereafter.
 | ||> |>
 | |
 | ||> There was a bug in the info script. Change the xrdb to xmodmap
 | ||>
 | |We did.  We still have the problem described.
 | |Thanks, but any other ideas?
 |
 |When we had trouble due to the xrdb in the script, we commented it out
 |rather than changing it to xmodmap as recommended. We have had no keyboard
 |mapping problems with either IBM or non-IBM servers.
 |
 |If you're running info on some non-IBM servers (such as NCD & HP) but using
 |an IBM system as a font server, you may also have a problem caused by info
 |tampering with your server's font path.
 |
 |IMO, clients should keep hands off of the server font path, key-mapping,
 |resource database, etc. Modifying these are the province of the user
 |or a display manager running on the user's behalf. At least, Info should
 |provide an option to bypass these favors.

----------------------------------
Ed Kubaitis (ejk@ux2.cso.uiuc.edu)
Computing Services Office - University of Illinois, Urbana

Robin D. Wilson (06/03/91)

In article <BRAZILE.91May30093302@soir.bbn.com> brazile@soir.bbn.com (Robert  
Brazile) writes:
> 
> Am I the only one for whom fonts don't work correctly? I have a 6000
> with both an 8-bit color card and a 24-bit color card. When running
> the 3003 X server on the 8-bit card, I could not use any application
> that used fixed-width fonts (such as Courier). They would display each
> character as if the server and the application had different ideas about
> the height of the character, so for "a" I would see all of an "a" and part
> of a "b" (obviously getting the next character in the font). This
> tended to make things unreadable.

The bug is in the load2d driver for the color graphics adapter.  It is fixed
in 2006 and is available from level 2 as an emergency fix.  I have seen this
problem with some code we are using here, and the fix does solve the problem.

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