Re: gfont problem with PS fonts on big-endian platforms (patch included)

[Dave Plonka <nospam@thanx>]

On Wed, Jul 21, 1999 at 03:20:39PM +0200, Frederic Le Mouel wrote:
> Dave Plonka wrote:
> > 
> > On big-endian architectures, gfont failed :)
> 
> Great patch, thanks. It works well now :)

Great - I'm glad the trouble of preparing the patch wasn't for naught.

> > I'm gathering that the rest of the user-base is on Intel hence they didn't 
> > bump into this issue.
> 
> My system is Solaris and I noticed this bug but I didn't find (and even try
> to find) how to solve :)

I pretty much had to step through the source in gdb since "gfont" didn't
report that it found the ".gdf" file to be invalid.  Without the patch,
gfont acted the same as when the ".gdf" is not found by proceeding to
invoke "gfont_pxtogdf" to recreate the invalid file *again*.

That it ended up to be the byte-order issue was insideous to find because
the gfont source *did* have byte-swap code which got invoked no
non-little-endian platforms, it was just that corresponding source for
"gfont_pxtogdf" didn't.  In gdb, I noticed that a value of 256 was being 
written into the ".gdf" file and was subsequently being read out (and
interpreted) as 65536 - Eureka!

> I also have a little configuration problem with the perl detection. I modify
> a bit your patch to take that into account.

You're certainly right - I should have mentioned that since gfont's
configure will not run with only my patch - users will need to get the
fix for testing the perl version as well.  (I sent that as a bug report
and others have similarly discussed this in the list.)

As an aside, my autoconf familiarity is apparently lacking - anyone know,
off the top of their head, how to surpress autoconf's innocuous warning:

   warning: AC_TRY_RUN called without default to allow cross compiling

because of my introduction of AC_C_BIGENDIAN?

Thanks,
Dave

-- 
plonka@doit.wisc.edu  http://net.doit.wisc.edu/~plonka  ARS:N9HZF  Madison, WI
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