Subject: Unreadable fonts in dialogs
From: Tom Goddard
Date: Feb 3, 2010

Next: 638

Hi

Im a graduate student in Walter Englanders lab. I recently
downloaded sparky for my linux machine (sparky-linux2.6.tar.gz). When
I run the bin file the program launches fine, but the text is
unreadable. The text in the banner above the windows are fine, but
within the windows it looks like pieces are missing from each letter
and some letters are missing entirely. I tried switching fonts, but
this had no effect. Is there a way to fix this problem? Any help would
be greatly appreciated.

Im running Ubuntu 8.04. My video card is an nVidia GeForce FX 5200.

John Skinner

Hi John,

I guess this is a problem with the fonts installed on your system.
Sparky asks for Lucida and Courier fonts. Maybe your system doesnt
have a Lucida font and Sparky is getting some horrible next-best-font.
The right solution is to put the needed fonts on your system. I never
heard of this problem before, so I suspect you have some unusual font
setup. If you prefer you can instead change Sparkys resource file

sparky/lib/Sparky

with a text editor changing the lines that say courier or lucida to
some other font like helvetica or times then restart Sparky and see
if that helps.

Tom