As just posted I have just updated a laptop from (X)ubuntu 22.04 to 24.04 and this
resulted in an update of fvwm from 2.6.8 to 2.7.0
I am experiencing a problem with the fonts of the buttons of a FvwmButtons.
My configuration (described, with screenshots and sample .fvwmrc in Me and windows) has a button box called MyBox in the top-right side if the screen.
As it works on my 20.04 desktop and worked on the 22.04 laptop, it has buttons (the ones labelled “task bar on/off”, the date, “1/2H/2V/2X”, “Pager on/off” etc.). These buttons appear in a bold font.
Now on Ubuntu 24/04 with fvwm 2.7.0 these buttons appear empty. They do work (when clicked). I see no errors in .xsession-errors.
If I remove (comment out) the *MyBox: Font line in .fvwm2rc (so that it uses the default font), the button text appears, in a smaller and not bold font.
BTW, xlsfonts shows the laptop has all the same fonts than the 20.04 desktop (plus others).
The font definitions (inherited from previous installations, I suspect some of them might be emulated) are such that *MyBox: Font is the same as *MyTaskBar: Font and the latter (another FvwmButton containing an FvwmIconMan) displays the bold font correctly
What can be the cause of all this, and is there a way out ?
Fonts are most likely drawn by xft and font config. These fonts due to dpi settings and the likes can be different sizes on different machines. FvwmButtons are a fixed size, if for some reason the font makes what you want to put into the button too big, it just won’t be seen. You should be able to get it to work by either increasing the size of the buttons that contain the text, or decreasing the font/text size you want to contain.
Thanks. Increasing *MyBox: ButtonGeometry from 150x25 to 150x26 did it. 1 pixel !
At the same time I had to adjust by trial and error *MyBox: Geometry.
The curious thing is/was that *MyTaskBar used an height of 24 and there the same bold font was always displayed.
I suppose the new Xubuntu release somehow altered the font characteristics (on the same machine!), and that there is a subtle interaction between Geometry and ButtonGeometry !
Most likely it was due to fontconfig, upstream fontconfig switched from DejaVu to Noto as its default sans and sans-seirf fronts (partly due to Noto having better support for utf-8 as it is supported by google). Anyways, this change would have slightly altered font appearances and sizes.
Fvwm and FvwmModules in particular are fairly static in that they won’t automatically adjust to fit content, so configurations may need adjusted between machines that have different fonts, dpi, etc.