XFT show characters outside my set font as blocks.

[GoogleCodeExporter]

* What steps will reproduce the problem?
  1. Set my font to something like Dejavu Sans/serif/mono, Liberation Sans/serif/mono, Droid Sans/Serif/Mono, etc
  2. Open some xmonad tabs that should render some foreign characters like japanese or korean

* What is the expected output? What do you see instead?
  - I see what is in the attached image. I get square blocks rather than the foreign text. in this case "日本語" is what i should see.
  - The problem occurs in xmobar and xmonad tabs, which i assume is a related issue.

* What version of the product are you using? On what operating system?
  - happens on xmonad 9.1 and pulling from latest darcs
  - I've tested on slackware, ubuntu, arch, debian

* Are you using an xmonad.hs?  Please attach it and the output of "xmonad 
--recompile".
** xmonad.hs:
http://hpaste.org/43098/xmonadhs

** xmonad --recompile (no output):
[dankles@mercury ~]$ xmonad --recompile
[dankles@mercury ~]$ 

** Other relevant info:
*** ~/.fonts.conf:
http://hpaste.org/paste/43098/fontsconf#p43099

* Please provide any additional information below.
If I set my font to a japanese font, japanese characters will display 
correctly. Or if i set it to a korean  font, korean fonts display fine as well. 
etc.

This seems to be an issue of xft not falling back to another font that has the 
correct characters.

other non-haskell xft apps seem to handle this fine. e.g. emacs, urxvt, etc..

** X11-xft:
This is actually likely to be a bug in the haskell x11-xft lib. I'm running the 
latest version (0.3)
http://hackage.haskell.org/package/X11-xft-0.3

There is a Hello.hs test file in the X11-xft package. If compiled, I get the 
same exact error with foreign characters.

This package hasn't been updated in nearly 3 years. I've emailed the developer, 
but he hasn't responded. So i'm coming to you guys, hoping that you can help me 
out in some way.

** Personal plug:
I've been using xmonad for about a year and a half now. I had been searching 
for "my" WM/DE of choice for years. Ever since KDE moved to KDE4. I've tried 
awesome, ion, fluxbox, xfce, gnome, openbox, lxde, stumpwm, and many more... 
Xmonad has finally been "it" for me. And this is the only bug that has been 
bothering me this whole time (which is better than i can say for any other 
WM/DE i've tried).

So I'm willing to help in ANY way on my end that i can.

Thanks

Original issue reported on code.google.com by Dank...@gmail.com on 17 Jan 2011 at 8:54

Attachments:

• 2011-01-17--1295252661_1680x1050_screen.png

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Ok, I tried setting my font to both my standard font and a japanese font like 
this:

myFontName = "xft:Mono:pixelsize=14, xft:TakaoGothic:size=14"

You can do something like this for URxvt too in .Xdefaults like this:

URxvt*font: xft:Mono:size=11, xft:TakaoGothic:size=14

But that had no effect at all.

Original comment by Dank...@gmail.com on 18 Jan 2011 at 10:57

[GoogleCodeExporter]

I've attempted this in the past, and from what I understand, that syntax is 
specific to urxvt (it doesn't work for dzen2 in ~/.Xdefaults either), so I 
don't think it will work in your xmonad.hs. The only real option right now is 
to use a font with all the character sets you need.

Original comment by sru...@gmail.com on 18 Jan 2011 at 11:57