[PLUG] Diagnosing/fixing fontconfig error [FIXED]

[Rich Shepard]

On Wed, 5 Feb 2025, Rich Shepard wrote:

> When I shut down X Windows on the Slackware64-14.2 desktop, among all the
> notices on the console are a bunch related to fonts. They start as:
> 	fontconfig error line 162: mismatched tag
> 	cannot load default file
> The last line is repeated multiple times.
>
> This same error just popped up when I ran a small PyQt5 app.

Ha! Fixed it. A web search brought me to /etc/fonts/fonts.conf which has
this heading:
<!--
         DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE.
         IT WILL BE REPLACED WHEN FONTCONFIG IS UPDATED.
         LOCAL CHANGES BELONG IN 'local.conf'
  -->

so I didn't look at it.

There is no local.conf so I looked at line 162 in fonts.conf and found
</blank> at the end of a long list of the default Unicode chars that are
expected to be blank in fonts. But the XML header for that list was a
comment <!-- blank --> instead of <blank>. Removing the comment chars fixed
the problem.

Sheesh!

Rich