Pango-WARNING **: failed to choose a font, expect ugly output

Question

I\'m getting this error when starting anything that uses the Pango library. I\'m using Kubuntu 9.10. I\'ve done \'sudo apt-get --reinstall install\' on libgtk* libcairo* l

Answer 1

I did a lot of searching on this and never found a decent answer. My issue involved running virt-manager (an xwindows based utility) on a remote server. I have all the fonts on my xwindows box but not on the remote host.

the i ran 'yum install xorg-x11-font*' on the remote host everything worked fine.

Answer 2

Your fonts are probably installed in /usr/X11R6/share/fonts but since pango-1.24 the fonts should be in /usr/share/fonts. The solution is to link the X11 fonts:

ln -s /usr/X11R6/share/fonts /usr/share

This should fix the problem.

Answer 3

I ran into this on Amazon Linux, with the minimal set of X packages necessary to run vncserver, and had to install dejavu-sans-fonts and dejavu-serif-fonts.

Answer 4

Verify font file permissions, especially on fonts you have installed manually, such as: out of package management scope.

Pango may fail with this error when the font is not readable by the desktop user. Example: font installed under /usr/share/fonts/..., owned by root, no others have read rights.

Answer 5

Make sure that font you are using with pango is installed on the machine.

Check for installed fonts in /usr/share/fonts directory.

To install new fonts try the steps mentioned in this document: