1.4.6 Problems with fonts

Why do the characters get changed to asterisks (’*’)?

The problem you are getting come from the fact that the xlib backend (when not using Xft) will only use one fixed X font for a given font name. If the font "helvetica" is used inside of GNUstep the one selected X font, in your case "-*-helvetica-medium-r-normal–12-*-*-*-p-*-iso8859-1" is used. So only characters (or glyphs) that are available in that font can be displayed. The selection of which font name to use happens inside the font_cacher and is more or less at random (the order fonts are listed by the X system).

You can influence the fonts that are available by setting:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain GSFontMask "*iso8859-13"
font_cacher

(or using a different character set, like iso8859-2). This is really a bug in GNUstep, but it hasn’t been fixed yet.

The other option is the use the art backend, which handles fonts much better. When compiling gnustep-back, start with

./configure --enable-graphics=art