[Alexandria-list] Alexandria and Pango

[Cathal Mc Ginley]

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On Mon, 28 Apr 2008 12:09:59 +0530
"Girish Kulkarni" <girish at hri.res.in> wrote:

Hi Girish,

glad to see you're still sticking with Alexandria even though
development is in the doldrums again.

> On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 12:07 PM, Girish Kulkarni wrote:
> > I started using Alexandria 0.6.3 on Ubuntu 8.04 after upgrading from
> >  Ubuntu 7.10 the day before. There is a problem however: this new
> >  version of Alexandria seems to have trouble with Pango.
> >
> >  Some book entries in my library are in Marathi and Hindi. These
> >  languages are written in the devanagari script, and correct
> > rendering of ligatures in unicode devanagari require Pango.
> > Alexandria 0.6.3 gives the following error while loading devanagari
> > entries from my library:
> >
> >  /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/gettext.rb: line 154
> >    Pango-WARNING **:Invalid UTF-8 string passed to
> > pango_layout_set_text()
> >

In the past, I've noticed that Pango errors of this sort are usually
due to the wrong locale setting, i.e. one without UTF-8 support, such
as LANG=xx_YY instead of LANG=xx_YY.utf8

> >  Further, when I click on any of the devanagari entries in,
> > Alexandria spews a lot of messages at the terminal, and crashes.
> > The whole session is as shown in the attached file. This did not
> > happen in the earlier version of Alexandria. There are no crashes
> > when I click on other entries.
> >

This could be related to [#19555] "Books without ISBN numbers can't be
edited", which in turn might relate to #18308. I'm guessing that many
of your Marathi and Hindi titles don't have ISBNs entered, whereas the
English titles do.

> > What could be wrong? Something wrong with the pango (v1.6.0) that
> >  comes with Ubuntu's new version? Any help appreciated.
> 

I've no idea about the root cause of this, since I haven't been
spending much time on Alexandria of late, but there was clearly a
regression somewhere along the line, and handling of books without
ISBNs was somehow broken. 

On a positive note, I can't reproduce #18308 or #19555 with the current
SVN, so whatever the problem was, it might be fixed (for the moment).
(How's *that* for optimism!!)

   -   C.
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