Octave Fontconfig error

Question

I installed Octave via Homebrew using the instructions given here.

When I try to generate a plot, I get the following message:

Fontconfig error: Cannot          


        

Answer 1

try

brew uninstall fontconfig

brew install fontconfig --universal

if you don't have or don't want to use xquartz, you can use qt

brew uninstall gnuplot

brew install gnuplot --with-qt

Answer 2

Actually, it's not an issue of Octave, but of its complicated setup and misconfiguration of other utilities (especially fontconfig).

For proper work you need to set manually path for fontconfig, so it wouldn't look for fonts in inappropriate directory (/etc/fonts works for Linux installations, but OS X XQuartz goes to different place).

You should run command export FONTCONFIG_PATH=/opt/X11/lib/X11/fontconfig to setup fontconfig proper way. Also you can add line export FONTCONFIG_PATH=/opt/X11/lib/X11/fontconfig to your ~/.bash_profile and restart your terminal, so you don't need to run this command anymore.