Strange utf8/iso encoding problem with bitmap fonts

[Frank Steiner]

Hi,

after upgrading from SLES 11 to SLES 12 one of my application that
is using bitmap fonts (that I try to keep for all apps as I prefer
them over antialised ttf fonts. etc) doesn't show certain characters.
E.g. the … signor certain characters with accents.

After long debugging I figured out that it loads iso version of the
fonts. Looking at the strace ofthe working run on a SLES 11 system I see this:

galois [16:27] fst 2149) grep -i helvR log.cauchy
20450 open("/usr/share/fonts/100dpi/helvR10.pcf.gz", O_RDONLY) = 28
20450 open("/usr/share/fonts/75dpi/helvR08.pcf.gz", O_RDONLY) = 28
20450 open("/usr/share/fonts/100dpi/helvR12.pcf.gz", O_RDONLY) = 33

But for a run on the SLES 12 system it is different:
galois [16:26] fst 2148) grep -i helvR log.galois
6728  access("/usr/share/fonts/75dpi/helvR12-ISO8859-1.pcf.gz", R_OK) = 0
6728  open("/usr/share/fonts/75dpi/helvR12-ISO8859-1.pcf.gz", O_RDONLY) = 13
6728  access("/usr/share/fonts/75dpi/helvR12-ISO8859-1.pcf.gz", R_OK) = 0
6728  open("/usr/share/fonts/75dpi/helvR12-ISO8859-1.pcf.gz", O_RDONLY) = 54
6728  open("/usr/share/fonts/75dpi/helvR08.pcf.gz", O_RDONLY) = 54
6728  open("/usr/share/fonts/75dpi/helvR14.pcf.gz", O_RDONLY) = 54
6728  open("/usr/share/fonts/100dpi/helvR08.pcf.gz", O_RDONLY <unfinished ...>

Now the special characters are indeed visible for font size 8 and 14, but
show as little dotted squares for size 12. When I remove the helvR12-ISO8859-1.pcf.gz
file, only the helvR12.pcf.gz is loaded and the characters also show 
in size 12.

SLES 11 for some reason was happy with the helvR??.pcf,gz. I've no
idea why SLES 12 thinks it needs to load the ISO variants.

Does anyone know a way I can influence what pcf files an application 
loads? I tried with setting LC_ALL, LANG, LC_CTYPE etc. to en_US.UTF-8
and starting the application from this terminal, but it doesn't change 
anything. 

cu,
Frank

-- 
Dipl.-Inform. Frank Steiner   Web:  http://www.bio.ifi.lmu.de/~steiner/
Lehrstuhl f. Bioinformatik    Mail: http://www.bio.ifi.lmu.de/~steiner/m/
LMU, Amalienstr. 17           Phone: +49 89 2180-4049
80333 Muenchen, Germany       Fax:   +49 89 2180-99-4049
* Rekursion kann man erst verstehen, wenn man Rekursion verstanden hat. *