# Eterm font difficulty



## imortallis (Mar 26, 2011)

Whenever I try to start Eterm, I get this error message:


```
Eterm: Error: Unable to load font "-adobe-helvetica-medium-r-normal--10-100-75-75-p-56-iso8859-1".
```

I can't for the life of me figure out where this font is located in order to install it. Anyone know where it is?



Here's my uname -a just fyi:

```
FreeBSD Skynet.HAYES 8.2-RELEASE FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE #0: Fri Feb 18 20:24:46 UTC 2011
root@almeida.cse.buffalo.edu:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC  i386
```


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## Fred (Mar 28, 2011)

Here (on an Arch Linux system...) this font is provided by the /usr/share/fonts/75dpi/helvR10-ISO8859-1.pcf.gz file, which is in the plist for x11-fonts/font-adobe-75dpi.

Now, why you would want Helvetica for a terminal emulator...


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## pixen (Jan 10, 2014)

Apologies for resurfacing this thread, however, I had the same problem.

I found two solutions for the eterm font problem, the first is the most elegant without hunting down fonts. Create or download an eterm theme (there are many available at http://www.eterm.org) and place this in your $HOME/.Eterm/themes/ directory, then create a symbolic link to the theme using the text Eterm.


```
mkdir -vp ~/.Eterm/themes
cd ~./Eterm/themes/
tar xzf (path to theme)
ln -s (theme title) Eterm
```

This should unset the default eterm behavior, you may need to examine the theme.cfg file and check that the fonts that the theme requests are available on your system, if not, use `xfontsel` to find fonts that are available and replace the fonts in the theme.cfg file with fonts you know you have access to.

The second method is far less than savory, this is also the method that I use on my systems.

After the source has been extracted in the ports tree, go to the work/Eterm-*.*/src directory and edit the defaultfonts.h. I replaced every instance of any unknown font with -*-fixed-*-*-*-*-12-*-*-*-*-*-*-*.

It may be enough to just remove the encoding, but I wanted to be certain that the font wouldn't fail. I understand that this is a really nasty hack, but it works for me and *I* thought others may benefit from this.


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