Arch Linux

I don't see how a dependency is considered a 'bug' - it's needed to run... Also fixing a bug in a closed source program (if one exists which I don't see here) is pretty much out of the hands of this community, it would have to be fixed by Adobe, so likewise the bug report would go to Adobe.

Justin, he didnt mean it was a bug in the flashplayer program, he meant it was a bug in the package (more specifically, in the PKGBUILD file). This is created and maintained by Arch developers.

However, I can't confirm this:
pacman -Rd gsfonts
firefox

and text in flash movies worked for me.

Perhaps this is an issue if other fonts are not installed?

I can reproduce this bug. I guess gsfonts just need to be added to PKGBUILD to get full functionality.

Pacman -Qi flasplugin shows

Depends On : mozilla-common libxt gtk2

an here is what pacman -Qs fonts shows before installing gsfonts,

local/fontsproto 2.0.2-1
X11 font extension wire protocol
local/t1lib 5.1.2-1
Library for generating character- and string-glyphs from Adobe Type 1 fonts
local/ttf-liberation 3-3
Red Hats Liberation fonts
local/xorg-fonts-100dpi 1.0.1-1 (xorg)
X.org 100dpi fonts
local/xorg-fonts-75dpi 1.0.1-2 (xorg)
X.org 75dpi fonts
local/xorg-fonts-alias 1.0.1-1
X.org font alias files
local/xorg-fonts-encodings 1.0.2-2
X.org font encoding files
local/xorg-fonts-misc 1.0.0-3
X.org misc fonts

I made a mistake and didnt check flashplugin versionin my previous comment , anyway this bug and solution is still valid with flashplugin 9.0.124.0-1.

At the time of this writing, gsfonts is still not in the depends=() of the flashplugin 9.0.124.0-1 PKGBUILD.

(On a sidenote, the package has been flagged out-of-date while there's no new version available on Adobe's site? http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash)

This issue is still occuring with me on all my systems. I cannot see any text such as the titles of the video recommendation on youtube (after a video finishes playing). The only difference now is that I have gsfonts installed, but I don't see any text so that solution is no longer valid.

This problem is described at http://linuxhelp.blogspot.com/2006/07/case-of-some-flash-based-games-unable.html and the general solution seems to be to install microsoft fonts (debian package: http://packages.debian.org/etch/msttcorefonts). I can't seem to find a similar package in the ArchLinux repositories, and AUR is currently down for maintenance.

pacman -S extra/ttf-ms-fonts

Installing ttf-ms-fonts and restarting the browser seems to have fixed the problem! Thank you. Would it be possible to make the flashplugin package show ttf-ms-fonts as optional dependency after installing?

Can you link to a flash .swf that has the problem? I could not replicate that both gsfonts and ttf-ms-fonts were required.

Maybe it's one of these commands from ttf-ms-font's install script that actually fixes the problem?


fc-cache -f
mkfontscale /usr/share/fonts/TTF
mkfontdir /usr/share/fonts/TTF

http://linuxhelp.blogspot.com/2006/07/case-of-some-flash-based-games-unable.html mentions the McVideoGame (http://www.mcvideogame.com/mcdonalds-eng.swf , http://www.mcvideogame.com/ if the swf does not load properly). You can see that after starting the new game that there are some empty boxes where text is supposed to be. Some images of the game:

without fonts: http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2836/3052/1600/game_without_font.jpg
with fonts: http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2836/3052/1600/game_with_fonts.jpg

This problem also occurs with YouTube recommendations (after a video finishes playing, it recommends other 'related' videos in the player but only images come up and no text is shown (such as title or time)).

Hrm, confirmed. ttf-fonts-ms is required for that to work. Maybe they specify a font that is only part of that package?

That is most likely the situation, and flash does not fallback to a default font. The only text in flash applications that I recall seeing are either videos or images (perhaps the default font is actually a microsoft font, or the fallback font is a microsoft font). I think it would be a good idea to make the microsoft fonts a dependency of flashplugin for the time being until a fallback font is implemented.

This issue still occurs in flashplugin 10.0.15.3-1.

Does flash use xft2/fontconfig ?
If yes, then fontconfig rules should have an alias for ms-ttf fonts.