Calc 3.0: invalid font spec errors upon startup

PROBLEM

Upon startup, IslandCalc reports errors like the following:

Invalid font spec at line X

Calc then crashes when opening main screen, loading a graph, or switching font type.

You may also see related X error messages like the following which indicate that a particular font is not available for the current display, e.g.

Warning: Cannot convert string "*courier-bold-r*-140-*iso8859*" to type FontStruct

SOLUTION

The crash is due to Calc not being able to load in any (or not enough) fonts. The cause could possibly be due to a improper or partial installation of X on the machine. Our engineers have reported observing this behavior under Solaris 2.x and AIX.

On Sun operating systems, the default font configuration file that Calc reads is:

$IOFFICE/klroot/servers/default/font.config

Font configuration files for other operating systems can be found in the appropriate directory under $IOFFICE/klroot/servers/, e.g. for AIX look in the rs6000 subdirectory.

Sometimes, the fonts specified in the font.config file do not match those available to the current X display. You can check to see what fonts are installed on your X server via the 'xlsfonts' command. The font.config file must be modified to use fonts that are available on your X server. You can make a copy of the font.config file to modify. Then, to test you can force IslandCalc to use it via the -fc switch, e.g.

% IslandCalc -fc font.config.copy &

Alternately, you can replace the default/font.config file with the one in the rs6000 subdirectory, which seems to work well in most cases.

# cd $IOFFICE/klroot/servers/default
# mv font.config font.config.bak
# cp ../rs6000/font.config .