No Text on Menus or Tool Tips

[Bill Trenker]

Bill Trenker wrote:

> I've just downloaded and built xfce4.  It's running fine but there is no text showing on any menus or tool-tips.

I see on the xfce forums that one user with this "no text" problem solved it on his system by eliminating a conflicting version of Pango.  Apparently his system had 2 versions of Pango installed.

My pkg-config shows the following:
noodle:/usr/lib# pkg-config --list-all | grep pango
pango                   Pango - Internationalized text handling
pangoxft                Pango Xft - Xft font support for Pango
pangoft2                Pango FT2 - Freetype 2.0 font support for Pango
pangox                  Pango X - X Window System font support for Pango

Using a Python script that dereferences the symbolic links of the various libraries spit out by ldd, here's what xfce4-panel has linked for pango-related and font-related libs:
noodle:~/xfce# python ldd.py xfce4-panel
<snip>
libpangox-1.0.so.0 => libpangox-1.0.so.0.200.5
libpango-1.0.so.0 => libpango-1.0.so.0.200.5
<snip>
libpangoxft-1.0.so.0 => libpangoxft-1.0.so.0.200.5
<snip>
libXft.so.2 => libXft.so.2.1
<snip>
libfontconfig.so.1 => libfontconfig.so.1.0
libfreetype.so.6 => libfreetype.so.6.3
<snip>

(The full dereferenced ldd listing is included at the end of this message just for reference.)

Mind you, I'm confused why my other GTK2 apps, like Abiword, are working fine.  I wonder if it's something to do with pkg-config?  I'll look into an xfce4 configure script and see how pkg-config is being called for pango.

Any suggestions you xfce4 experts have would be very much appreciated.  I don't mind digging in and trying to fix this, I just need some direction.

The funny thing is, I like xfce so much that I'm using it anyways without the fonts working.  Trying to use the xfce4 menus is sure a hit-and-miss adventure when you don't have any menu text <wink>.

Thanks,
Bill

------------------------------------------------------------------------

noodle:~/xfce# python ldd.py xfce4-panel
libxfcegui4.so.1 => libxfcegui4.so.1.0.6
libatk-1.0.so.0 => libatk-1.0.so.0.200.4
libpangox-1.0.so.0 => libpangox-1.0.so.0.200.5
libpango-1.0.so.0 => libpango-1.0.so.0.200.5
libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0 => libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0.200.4
libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0 => libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0.200.4
libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.so.0 => libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.so.0.200.4
libgmodule-2.0.so.0 => libgmodule-2.0.so.0.200.3
libgobject-2.0.so.0 => libgobject-2.0.so.0.200.3
libglib-2.0.so.0 => libglib-2.0.so.0.200.3
libpangoxft-1.0.so.0 => libpangoxft-1.0.so.0.200.5
libdl.so.2 => libdl-2.2.5.so
libxfce4mcs-client.so.1 => libxfce4mcs-client.so.1.0.1
libSM.so.6 => libSM.so.6.0
libICE.so.6 => libICE.so.6.3
libX11.so.6 => libX11.so.6.2
libxfce4util.so.1 => libxfce4util.so.1.0.0
libxml2.so.2 => libxml2.so.2.5.7
libpthread.so.0 => libpthread-0.9.so
libz.so.1 => libz.so.1.0.1
libm.so.6 => libm-2.2.5.so
libc.so.6 => libc-2.2.5.so
libXrandr.so.2 => libXrandr.so.2.0
libXext.so.6 => libXext.so.6.4
libXft.so.2 => libXft.so.2.1
libXrender.so.1 => libXrender.so.1.2
libfontconfig.so.1 => libfontconfig.so.1.0
libfreetype.so.6 => libfreetype.so.6.3
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 => ld-2.2.5.so
libexpat.so.1 => libexpat.so.1.0