MicroAPL Support forum for APLX

Somehow I only get the Alt-Variant of the keys. The program seems to think I'm constantly pressing the Alt key. If I type ")load" (without the shift key) which I understand should give me ")LOAD" but I get ")load". If I press the shift key I get the Alt+Shift variant of L (block with a slash) and O (block). For example pressing the keys 4, 5, 6 (without Shift, Alt or any modifier) gives me ⌽ ⍉ ⊖ which would be the Alt mapping.

The same when I switch to the Unified layout. I get the Alt keys despite not pressing Alt or AltGr.

(doesn't matter whether I use German or US Keyboard layout).

edit: Using copy and paste to enter the commands I get the edit window and the font display looks correct.

MicroAPL wrote:Is it the keyboard mapping or the font display which is wrong? You can easily tell by loading a workspace using the File menu, or just typing:

)LOAD 10 DISPLAY

and then editing the DISPLAY function, again either using the menus or just typing:

)EDIT DISPLAY

I suppose it is not a mapping issue since I load the same .xkm file for years. I also loaded existing workspace and the edit function displays wrong chars.
As Dick mentioned in point 1- trying to change the font size in the session has no effect, which tends to prove that it is a font issue imho

The problem is the fact that Ubnuntu hasn't installed the fonts. A quick Google suggests that the reason is likely to be that Ubuntu by default disables bitmapped fonts (like the PCF fonts used by APLX):

http://www.alanbriolat.co.uk/2009/04/en ... tu-jaunty/

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=792471

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Fonts

Please excuse the tone of exasperation in what follows - it is meant to be a tone of curiosity.

If Ubuntu hasn't installed the fonts why are they useable in OpenOffice? Or is OpenOffice seeing some non-bitmapped fonts?

What do we have to do to make the fonts useable by APLX? Just follow the various instructions above?

Open Office is probably using the TrueType font (aplx_unicode.ttf). APLX uses the X-Windows bitmap screen fonts (aplx10.pcf, aplx12.pcf etc)

Unfortunately there are many different Linux distributions and they keep changing things (the concept of upwards compatibility doesn't seem to be a strong point of Linux). It's hard for us to keep up with the exact instructions for every distribution, but certainly if Ubuntu have disabled bitmapped fonts that's likely to be the problem.

Thanks for the tips. I thought it was related to Unity but when I tried to install APLX on Fedora and opensuse it failed to display the fonts properly so I suppose it's not specific to Ubuntu, maybe a Gnome3 changeover. It is clear that Linux is changing quickly, breaking things each time a new version is available and it's difficult for developers to fix everything.

As far as I'm concerned, I'm happy with v1.1, only a multi-core optimization would make me switch to a newer version of APLX.

Problem solved for me. I managed to activate bitmaps like that in Ubuntu

Code: Select all

cd /etc/fonts/conf.d
rm 70-no-bitmaps.conf
ln -s ../conf.avail/70-force-bitmaps.conf .
fc-cache -f