Fontconfig - Nov 2005 - Encoding/loading error in Fontconfig config file

>>>>> Steinar Bang <sb@dod.no>:
> Platform: Pentium M (Dell Latitude D600 laptop),
> 	  debian sarge (testing/unstable),
> 	  XFree86 4.3.0.dfsg.1-4,
> 	  qt 3.3.2-0pre2,
> 	  kde 3.2.2-1,
> 	  fontconfig 2.2.3-1
> When I came back from vacation, I did an "apt-get dist-upgrade"
which
> upgraded a lot of packages.  After this, my own Qt application has
> acted strangely.  It prints out
> 	Fontconfig error: line 1: unknown encoding
> 	Fontconfig error: Cannot load default config file
> to the console when starting up, and comes up with a really strange
> looking font (from the output resulting from setting FC_DEBUG=1, it
> looks like it may be a font called "Arioso"?).
> I''m aiming for helvetica, which should be the default font for Qt
> anyway.
What caused this problem was that my application was linked with two
separate versions of expat, both as shared libraries.

I verified this by eliminated my application''s need for my own version
of expat, and instead made it use the same version as Fontconfig
(ie. libexpat 1.95.6-8 in debian sarge).

This made my application start up without the error message, and with
the expected Helvetica font.

But this gives me a serious performance hit, since the native expat
shared lib on debian is compiled to deliver strings as UTF-8 in single
width char strings, while my code is actually expecting UTF-16 in
short int arrays (or wchar_t arrays).  I don''t know what to do about
that.

I''m guessing the character width/encoding compile time difference, is
probably what caused the Fontconfig errors in the first place.

Platform: Pentium M (Dell Latitude D600 laptop),
	  debian sarge (testing/unstable),
	  XFree86 4.3.0.dfsg.1-4,
	  qt 3.3.2-0pre2,
	  kde 3.2.2-1,
	  fontconfig 2.2.3-1

When I came back from vacation, I did an "apt-get dist-upgrade" which
upgraded a lot of packages.  After this, my own Qt application has
acted strangely.  It prints out
	Fontconfig error: line 1: unknown encoding
	Fontconfig error: Cannot load default config file
to the console when starting up, and comes up with a really strange
looking font (from the output resulting from setting FC_DEBUG=1, it
looks like it may be a font called "Arioso"?).

I''m aiming for helvetica, which should be the default font for Qt
anyway.

Is there a way to find the offending file causing the error messages?
Some debug option, perhaps?

I have googled, and seen others on with this error message (mostly on
GTk applications), but no answers to what causes it.

The debian fontconfig package has three config files
	/etc/fonts/fonts.conf
	/etc/fonts/local.conf
	/var/lib/fontconfig/local.conf
They all start with
	<?xml version="1.0"?>
I have tried changing that to
	<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
but it didn''t make any difference.

KDE applications work without a hitch.  fc-list works without giving
any error messages.

	fc-list helvetica
gives me:
	Helvetica:style=Bold Italic
	Helvetica:style=Italic
	Helvetica:style=Bold
	Helvetica:style=Regular

fc-cache -v as my own user gives the following output:
	fc-cache: "/usr/share/fonts": skipping, no write access
	fc-cache: "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1": skipping, no write access
	fc-cache: "/usr/local/share/fonts": skipping, no write access
	fc-cache: "/home/sb/.fonts": skipping, no such directory
	fc-cache: "/var/lib/defoma/fontconfig.d": skipping, no write access
	fc-cache: "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts": skipping, no write access
	fc-cache: succeeded
fc-cache -v as root gives a lot more output.

There is an environment variable LANG=C set, but no LC_* variables
set. 

Thanx!


- Steinar