fontconfig

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 load default config file warning: could not match any font: *-normal-normal-10 warning: called from axes at line 66 column 10 gca at line 58 column 9 newplot at line 148 column 8 surf at line 70 column 9 sombrero at line 65 column 5 I then get a long series of the following messages: warning: ft_render: unable to load appropriate font warning: could not match any font: *-normal-normal-10 Usually the plot appears once, but if I call it again

From a scripting language (Python or Ruby, say) on a Debian-based system, I would like to find either one of: All the Unicode codepoints that a particular font has glyphs for All the fonts that have glyphs for a particular Unicode codepoint (Obviously either 1 or 2 can be derived form the other, so whatever is easier would be great.) I have done this in the past by running: fc-list : file charset ... and parsing the output at the end of each line, based on this code from fontconfig but it seems to me that there ought to be a much simpler way of doing this. (I'm not completely sure this is the