[developers] Thai test items not displaying in [incr tsdb()]

[Emily M. Bender]

Hello again,

Glenn has been looking into this further, and it seems that he's
at least isolated the problem:

 Yes, [incr tsdb()] uses Tcl/tk do it's drawing. It's requesting a font
 "Helvetica" which is not on my machine. Tcl/tk seems to be ignoring any
 Gnome or GTK font mappings and so an ugly bitmap font comes up (no Thai)
 instead of a nice modern vector font.

 The Tcl code obtains the font name 'Helvetica' from $globals( ), but these
 settings are apparently not read in from anywhere but rather hard-coded at
 the top of podium.tcl. If I could build [incr tsdb()] I could try changing
 it here.

 I can't find a font which calls itself "Helvetica" (internally) and has Thai
 characters. (Renaming a font's filename isn't sufficient, but a possibility
 might be to munge a suitable font with a font editor, which I don't have) It
 might even *have* to be a bitmap font, to work with Tcl, I don't know.

Has anyone had to do something similar before?

Thanks,
Emily

On Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 8:50 PM, Emily M. Bender
<ebender at u.washington.edu> wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> One of my students (Glenn Slayden, cc-ed) is working on
> Thai this quarter.  The assignment this week is to customize
> a starter grammar, develop a test suite, and parse the test
> suite with the starter grammar.  So far Trollet and LUI (from
> the DELPH-IN distribution) are fine displaying the Thai
> orthography, but we are running into problems with [incr tsdb()]:
>
> http://www.glennslayden.com/webshare/Screenshot.png
>
> We tested this also in the LOGON version here:
>
> svn checkout http://svn.emmtee.net/tags/handon logon
>
> This gets us [incr tsdb()] (24-nov-08), but the problem persists.
> This is under Ubuntu 8.10 x64.  Problematic item file attached.
>
> Is this a known problem?  Any work-arounds?
>
> Thanks,
> Emily
>