Open file dialog box won't display text characters properly, empty square boxes

toomuchacid · 24 September 2021 23:08

As pictured below in the thread, the character sets somewhat often aren’t able to be displayed in open file dialog boxes. I can’t find the pattern to see what package is affecting this as it’s sporadic.

Has anyone come across this before?

Fabby · 25 September 2021 10:47

Welcome to Manjaro!

Please read this for the future:

as now we can’t see what your output is…

I’m guessing here, but you probably installed Manjaro in English and have trouble with non-western languages like русский язык, हिन्दी भाषा, …so you need to install an international font and Googles Noto is the one that is most global in nature.

If that would not solve your issue,

Please read this:
[HowTo] Provide System Information
and press the three dots … below your post and press the to give us more information so we can see what’s really going on.
Now we know the symptom of the disease, but we need some more probing to know where the origin lies…
An inxi --admin --verbosity=7 --filter --no-host --width would be the minimum required information for us to be able to help you. (Personally Identifiable Information like serial numbers and MAC addresses will be filtered out by the above command)
Also, please copy-paste that output in-between 3 backticks ``` at the beginning and end of the code/text.

P.S. If you want to notify me that you did provide this information, please this message and I’ll come back and have another look.

toomuchacid · 16 October 2021 06:42

ok thanks for the tutorial!

https://paste.pics/ff5e197fdd2078cc3b3052233ac601d0
and
https://paste.pics/90c9514015414f05254aadd1ebbdd05c

I will try the Google font package as I have no idea which font package it is that I’m missing for the program and report back.

toomuchacid · 16 October 2021 13:20

@Fabby I have not been able to identify which font or character set I require from the dialog boxes… and while I have installed many interesting fonts from Google Fonts, the git hasn’t been of help either.

Fabby · 16 October 2021 19:37

You need only one: Noto

Does this:

show something like this:

Did I guess correctly? (I.E. What’s the output to locale?)

toomuchacid · 16 October 2021 20:08

your output was displayed as intended
https://paste.pics/aeb2a13928cd5d6049a85a21306747c5

locale output is:

$ locale                                                                                                   ✔ 
LANG=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_TIME=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_NAME=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_ALL=

Fabby · 17 October 2021 16:58

That’s weird and shouldn’t happen…

Does this also happen when you create a new user and log in there? (E.G. toomuchacid2)

alven · 17 October 2021 22:13

Why I see your locale output randomly formatted? were you edit it manually? or were you have a storage failure?

Compare with mine:

LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

What formatting difference you can see?

Please, first answer to yourself in try to note what I noted. Only after that continue

Try more

Even more!!! Harder!

Your locale output contains some lines w/o quotes. May be it is the cause, may be not, I do not know.

Try to re-generate locale:

sudo locale-gen

That’s what I did in other lack (caused the package re-installation): [Unstable Update] 2021-05-28 - Kernels, Perl, Cinnamon 5.0, Haskell, Tesseract, Cutefish - #110 by alven

After that try to re-start your applications (there was no need to reboot for me there, but I do not know your case)

toomuchacid · 22 October 2021 01:34

$ sudo locale-gen                                                                                                                                                                             
[sudo] password for {username-withheld}: 
Generating locales...
  de_DE.UTF-8... done
  en_AU.UTF-8... done
  en_US.UTF-8... done
  en_US.UTF-8... done
  en_AU.UTF-8... done
Generation complete.
Copying saved locales...
Copying complete.

$ locale                                                                                                                                                                                      
LANG=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_TIME=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_NAME=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_ALL=

toomuchacid · 22 October 2021 01:35

I haven’t tried that yet… I have a guest account I setup already, I’ll check that one first.

[EDIT] : Hi @Fabby! ok, no nothing has changed. I edited the /etc/locale.conf file to make sure all variables listed were in quotation marks.

$ sudo nano /etc/locale.conf
LANG="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_AU.UTF-8"

$ locale
LANG=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_TIME=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_NAME=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_ALL=


$ sudo locale-gen
[sudo] password for {username-withheld}: 
Generating locales...
  en_AU.UTF-8... done
  en_AU.ISO-8859-1... done
  en_GB.UTF-8... done
  en_US.UTF-8... done
  en_US.UTF-8... done
  en_AU.UTF-8... done
Generation complete.
Copying saved locales...
Copying complete.

$ locale
LANG=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_TIME=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES="en_AU.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_NAME=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION=en_AU.UTF-8
LC_ALL=

So, any other tricks I haven’t investigated yet ?

alven · 23 October 2021 16:40

You meant that one day the exact package shown normally but on other day the same package shown with that squares instead of chars? So affecting is random?

Is that windows are the package windows of related to the DE (your GNOME3) like open/save file diaplogs, etc. or you ment the package main GUI windows itself?

Yes, at least:

Do you have all updates?

Have no ignored packages?

Uses actual/fresh mirrors?

Check them by yourself:

cat /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

and find them in the https://repo.manjaro.org/

alven · 22 November 2021 22:23

@toomuchacid
devs did the Reinstalling glibc introduces `call to execv failed (No such file or directory)` on the `Restoring locales` stage update that touches locales functionality. It is in stable branch at least for a couple of days.

Try to get updates,
Check the output of the

pacman -Qi glibc-locales | grep Ver

and if the is Version : 2.33-1 or higher, execute

sudo pacman -S glibc

as attempt to trigger new functionality - may be that will be a pill.

EDIT:

Also check the [Unstable Update] 2021-11-24 - ICU 70.1 rebuilds, VirtualBox 6.1.30 post. It is currently in unstable branch, but soon will join testing and stable.