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Re: Decwindows with KEA!X : report

 
Wim Van den Wyngaert
Honored Contributor

Decwindows with KEA!X : report

We are using KEA!X 4.2 on XP. We start decwindow sessions on OpenVMS 7.3.

I regularly get font not found messages.
I regularly get messages of (bold) fonts having the wrong size (or side effects of that).

Some of them disappear when you play with the sequence of fonts paths.

Why ? Is there a solution ?

YES. The good news is that I already found it myself.

KEA!X uses fonts of itself and fonts of Windows. Windows also tries to calculate the missing fonts (but sometimes wrongly). But a real VMS workstation uses the fonts delivered with OpenVMS. So these are the ones we need.

1) on VMS, modify sys$startup:decw$private_server_setup.com. Add a line
$ DECW$START_FONT_SERVER == "TRUE"
Restart decwindows. There should be a process called DECW$XFS. If not, there could be missing some files on your system (I had, no proper error message, had to compare the directory with a working one and found 2 files missing).

2) on pc in the font tab of KEA!X config, add tcp/node:7100 at the top of the font list.
KEA!X will now download the fonts from the VMS node. Now the fonts will look the same as on a real workstation and no more error messages are given. Side effect : startup is slower.

I guess ReflectionX must have analogue problems.

Any further remarks are welcome.

Wim
Wim
5 REPLIES 5
John Gillings
Honored Contributor

Re: Decwindows with KEA!X : report

Wim,

You don't need to restart DECwindows. No need to terminate all your existing windows. The appropriate RUN/DETACHED command can be found in SYS$STARTUP:DECW$STARTSERVER.COM. Just execute it from SYSTEM to start your font server.

You only need ONE font server anywhere in your network, it can run on any platform, and can serve any platform. You may also have more than one for redundancy.

You can define the symbol DECW$FONT_SERVERS in DECW$PRIVATE_SERVER_SETUP to be a list of font servers which your server can use to resolve font requests.

There are two programs in SYS$SYSTEM for talking to font servers, FSINFO and FSLSFONTS. Simplest usage is:

To see if it's alive:

$ MCR FSINFO -SERVER your.node.address:7100

To list all available fonts:

$ MCR FSLSFONTS -server tcp/your.node.address:7100 -fn "*"

$ MCR DECW$EXAMPLES:XMFONTS

to display font samples.
A crucible of informative mistakes
Wim Van den Wyngaert
Honored Contributor

Re: Decwindows with KEA!X : report

Small remark. When restarting decwindows, XFS is not restarted. A manual stop/id must be done before the restart and then restart will start it.

But today all kea!x clients restarted. For some strange reason all clients say

Could not open default font "fixed".
Please reinstall "misc" font.

Nothing changed in the fonts.

Any ideas ?

Wim
Wim
Wim Van den Wyngaert
Honored Contributor

Re: Decwindows with KEA!X : report

Forgot to mention that if you remove the XFS line in font config, it works again. Restarting everything on the server didn't help. Nothing in XFS log file.

Wim
Wim
Wim Van den Wyngaert
Honored Contributor

Re: Decwindows with KEA!X : report

XFS did read the file fixed_100dpi.pcf in the 100dpi directory. But nothing else.
XFS received the string "fixed" from kea!x (tcptrace). No readable error messages found in the tcptrace.

Wim
Wim
Wim Van den Wyngaert
Honored Contributor

Re: Decwindows with KEA!X : report

Still not working. But discovered that XFS is not using the logical decw$fonts but yet another config list in sys$manager:decw$fs_config.dat. And this list may not contain empty directories. So, all "user" customizing can not be included before it is present. And if an empty directory is encountered, xfs aborts. And kea!x hangs.

Wim
Wim