VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Fri Oct 05 2012 - 09:08:05 CDT

Hi,
  Problems with Tk fonts are generally caused not by the compilation of
VMD (or FLTK) but are usually the result of a lack of fonts installed
with the X11 Windowing system. Tk obtains its fonts by querying the
host windowing system for fonts that match the characteristics of a request.
If the host windowing system has no match, then Tk tries to fallback to
some font that is available.

>From the description below, it sounds to me like there might be something
amiss the X11 window system fonts or one of the X11 libraries on the machine
you're using, and that this is preventing the Tk library embedded in
VMD from getting anything other than the default font.

Since you're able to get a simple test to work in a standalone interpreter,
one thing that may be worth checking is whether there might be some
problem with the 64-bit libs on your machine. Is the "tclsh" that you
run in your example below a 32-bit or 64-bit library? What do you get
from this command, when you run it in your tclsh:
  puts "$tcl_version"
  puts "$tk_version"

Cheers,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Thu, Oct 04, 2012 at 11:07:03AM +0200, Vlastimil Zíma wrote:
> Hi,
>
> after several attempts I still can not resolve troubles with tk fonts when
> I compile VMD.
>
> I am using 64bit Debian with following vmd configuration:
>
> ./configure LINUXAMD64 OPENGL FLTK TK IMD XINPUT NETCDF CONTRIB TCL PYTHON
> PTHREADS NUMPY NOSTATICPLUGINS
>
> and tk packages:
> libfltk1.3-dev 1.3.0-8 (I also tried fltk1.1)
> tcl-dev 8.5.0-2
> tk-dev 8.5.0-2
>
> Still timeline, sequence viewer and other plugins which uses customized
> fonts has invisible texts. I tried anything I found on this mailing list,
> including LC_ALL=C in environment and $HOME/.tkconrc file. I also tried a
> simple script with uses custom font based on code of timeline which works:
>
> > tclsh
> package require Tk
> font create tkFixedTimeline -family Courier -size -12
> ttk::label .l -text "Attention!" -font tkFixedTimeline
> grid .l -row 0
>
> This shows nice small box with monofont "Attention!" in it.
>
> I will be glad for any help which would help to resolve this problem.
> Vlastimil 

-- 
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/           Phone: 217-244-3349
http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/       Fax: 217-244-6078