Hi everybody,

I am occasionally using gimp on debian testing, Thinkpad 460p, 64bit, KDE desktop. My installation has aged for a while and contains smaller contributions from the unstable and stable archive as well. gimp is at version 2.10.18

Problem is, gimps GUI interface font stopped to be readable or to be present on my system at some point and instead on all menues I see what I understand as replacements for missing font glyphs (i.e. small rectangles with 4 numbers/letters that represent the character encoding, see attached screenshot). I have removed and re-installed the program (the packages gimp, gimp-data) in the hope that some dependency (the interface font) would be pulled in in the progress. I have checked the general font configuration (fontconfig is installed, package version 2.13.1). When I start gimp from a terminal, there are no error messages. In .xsession-errors, looking for gimp, I find

couldn't find ("nautilus.desktop") which is supposedly extended by "nautilus-sendto" couldn't find ("gimp.desktop") which is supposedly extended by "gimp-data-extras"

which may or not be relevant, though I do not understand that message.

Which font is required to be installed or what is the process by which gimp selects the interface font? Has anybody seen and solved this problem?

Thanks a lot,

Stefan

Probably you have choen a gimp theme or a gtk2 theme (.gtk2rc0 that uses a Type 1 font (PostScript, .pfa or .pfb fies); the system Pango libraries no loger support these.

Try renaming ~/.config/GIMP and see what happens.

I removed all gimp related configuration and caches from my home directory without effect. However, your hint that a type1 font could be involved made me check the strace output of gimp: There, I found (more guessing than understanding) that gimp picked for whatever reason an obscure font from the /usr/share/fonts/type1/gsfonts directory.

After deinstallation of the package which installs this/these font(s), gimp behavior returned to normal.

Thank you for your input

Stefan