Forums Bug Reports 7.02 beta - minor Fixedsys font problems with Wine

I've been running mIRC 6.x under Wine for quite some time now, and it's been working pretty well, all things considered in regards to Wine itself. After seeing the note that the mIRC 7.02 beta has some better support for Wine, I decided to test it out. I still used Fixedsys as a font and copied the respective .fon files from a Windows machine to Wine's Fonts directory so the Fixedsys font shows up correctly in mIRC (although lacking in bold, but that's Wine's problem, not mIRC's).

Everything seems to be working, but the > symbol (doesn't matter if it's the one next to the nick or anywhere else in the line) has a problem. Under mIRC 6.x, the > shows up in Fixedsys until a Unicode message comes in, at which point it shows up in what seems to be Arial. Under mIRC 7.02 (as well as 7.01, I tried this out for a short time as well), the > symbol always shows up as if it were in Arial instead of Fixedsys.

As I am using mIRC under Wine, I am running KDE 3.5.10 currently. When I copy a Unicode symbol, such as the 1/3 symbol, and paste it into the editbox, I only see a black box, both under 6.35 and under 7.02. Now, I can understand why it would do this under 6.35 since it was not a truly Unicode aware application, but I wonder why it shows up wrong under 7.02. Also, when I paste a 1/3 symbol and send the message, 6.35 shows the symbol correctly in a non-Fixedsys font, but 7.02 just shows a non-Fixedsys box instead of the symbol.

You might want to try Fixedsys Excelsior.
http://www.fixedsysexcelsior.com/
It's a truetype remake of fixedsys, that also supports bold and italic and has a huge load of unicode characters included.

Regarding the > character: my guess is that this is related to the font-linking routines in mIRC. They are complicated and have had to be tweaked many times to make them work well under Windows XP, Vista, and 7. It would be very difficult to tweak these routines to make them work under Wine. The only practical option, if it is an issue, would be to disable font-linking in mIRC under Wine.

As for the display of Unicode characters in the editbox: mIRC has no control over this under any version of Windows. The editbox is a Windows control and displays text using its own methods. Note that under Wine, mIRC v7.02 no longer uses the richedit editbox control since there were too many issues with it. mIRC uses the standard Windows editbox control under Wine.

Just to clarify: the main reason I implemented workarounds for Wine in the latest beta is that v7.x was crashing. My aim was to make mIRC runnable and usable under Wine, although I ended up implementing a number of workarounds for obvious issues, beyond the one particular issue that was causing mIRC to crash. Unfortunately I do not have the time to regularly test mIRC under Wine. As Wine developers would probably point out: it should be Wine that is improved to work as closely as possible to Windows. Applications implementing workarounds is somewhat detrimental to the Wine project.

In reply to m0viefreak, I did try Fixedsys Excelsior at one point, but for some reason, I still did not get bolded text with it.

To Khaled, is the font-linking something that can be enabled/disabled by users or something you would have to modify in mIRC's code? Also, I completely agree that Wine needs to be improved instead of the applications, but at least mIRC runs smoothly with Wine. I'd be willing to help do testing on what works or doesn't work under Wine, but I am unsure as to what needs testing. Most of the things I do with mIRC have functioned properly, although I have noticed that the option for mIRC to monitor script file changes doesn't work. But this never worked with any mIRC 6.x either as long as I have been running mIRC under Wine.

It is not possible to disable font-linking under mIRC v7.x as it is now enabled permanently.

I will add these issues to my to-do list, however for the time being I really do need to focus on making sure that mIRC v7.x is working correctly under XP, Vista, and 7. I will try to look into any outstanding issues under Wine when I have the time though.

I thought I saw a font linking option in mirc.ini on a clean install of the beta. Is this used at all? Would changing the value disable it, or is this accidentally left in from old versions and has no effect?

No, it is not used in the current version, although everything related to the way this feature works is still in place in case I decide to add it again.

I just tested v7.02 under Wine and could not reproduce the issue that you described with the > character. Can you describe a step by step method to reproduce this? Unfortunately, it may depend on the combination of fonts that you have installed, and perhaps other Wine settings.

I also checked the monitor script file changes feature and it worked fine under Wine for me. Whenever a file was changed outside of mIRC, the warning dialog appeared in mIRC as expected.

I am testing under Ubuntu 9.10 and Wine 1.0.1-0ubuntu8.

I've been using mIRC under Wine for the last few weeks (under OSX's Darwine) and I've had the > issue on Fixedsys but didn't think much of it. I can, however, confirm it's there-- likely due to font-linking, so it didn't surprise me.

Can you describe a method that reproduces the issue with the > character for you?

Don't you think that if WINE doesn't display it properly, that the issue is with Wine not "emulating" (I know it's not the right word, but you get the point) something properly, and thus the issue should be reported to the Wine devlopers instead?

Emulating is the right word.

You are correct that WINE should be the one to fix it. Khaled mentioned before that they should be the ones fixing the problems and that his main goal was just to prevent crashing under WINE. He just decided to put in a little more work to make it run a little better while he was at it. That said, if he wants to put in some more fixes in mIRC's code to handle WINE issues then there's nothing wrong with that as long it doesn't detract from Windows.

The Wine bug list currently contains 5611 bug reports :-) Some of them are related to mIRC and have been there for several years. While I agree that it would be better to report all bugs to the Wine project, at some point I have to choose between implementing workarounds so that users can actually use mIRC under Wine, or just waiting and hoping that the issues get fixed.

Since mIRC v7.x was crashing, I decided it was only fair to look into it for those users who use mIRC under Wine. However any time I spend on it takes away from actually developing mIRC.

This particular issue, relating to the > character, could be caused by almost anything - we have not established a cause yet.

The downside of 'fixing' it in mIRC is that at a later time, you'll have to change it again because it'll be fixed on Wine's side...

//echo -a <> in a completely clean install of mIRC should reproduce this (the "<" is just for comparison):

That displays normal looking <> characters in the FixedSys font here. I think it might depend on the types of fonts that you have in the Wine Fonts folder. If you delete all of the fonts in the Wine Fonts folder and install only the ones that allow you to reproduce the issue, and then let me know the list of fonts you are using, that should allow me to reproduce it.