Advice for a developer on how to fix font issues with snap

I’m the developer of the Snippet Pixie app, and have been contacted by a Manjaro KDE user that only sees rectangles in place of any text characters in the app’s main window.

I’ve been able to reproduce the problem not only on a clean (fully updated) install of Manjaro KDE, but also the Awesome, bspwm and i3 editions. Alas the GNOME version had too many problems of its own for me to get to the point of being able to get a working terminal.

I’ve tried the snippetpixie snap on a bunch of other distros, including various non-Ubuntu based ones such as Fedora and Solus, none have this issue, only Manjaro.

I’ve scoured this and the snapcraft forum for advice, but failed to find anything concrete that might help me fix the issue.

The font cache clearing steps do not work in any environment I try, so I’m guessing there’s some incompatibility between how Snippet Pixie is built and/or packaged and how Manjaro handles GTK apps from snaps.

I have a feeling the problem is related to Snippet Pixie being a “classic” snap, i.e. not confined.

Otherwise it may be because Snippet Pixie does not specify a font itself, the default is used, which generally presents itself as “Open Sans” when inspecting the app’s CSS (in elementary).

Has anyone got any advice on how a developer like myself might be able to fix my snap?

Have any other developers had the same problem and been able to fix it?

Has whoever works on the snap integration for Manjaro had any success in pinpointing how this problem occurs?

Thanks in advance from myself and users of Snippet Pixie! :smiley:

1 Like

So, I think I got it working by switching from a base of core18 to core20. :tada:

1 Like

Hello, I has same problem on KDE Manjaro with snap prospect mail. I dont fully understand how you fix problem.

Me problem is when i click to DOWNLOAD in mail, application show GTK popUp with broken font and with bad theme (i use dark and popup has default theme)

remove font cache not work for me

I try find some config on font and i find interesting “solution”

Me prospect mail is started from folder /var/lib/snapd/snap/bin

i have teams in snap too, and i don’t understund how work simlink from bin folder.
ls -la
prospect-mail → /usr/bin/snap
teams → /usr/bin/snap

How can by same simlink target on two different application ?


But when i start prospect mail directly from
/var/lib/snapd/snap/prospect-mail/current/prospect-mail everithing work fine.
GTK theme is dark and fonts are fine.

I don’t undestand what is broken in …snapd/bin dir

I had the same problem with the Bluemail Snap. The solution of executing from the /var/lib/snapd/bluemail folder worked for me too.