Browser texts broken in v 12.0 build 1467 on Ubuntu 12.04

Browser texts broken in v 12.0 build 1467 on Ubuntu 12.04

Fonts in browser texts (menus, tab tooltips, context menu) are displayed as boxes.
I've not changed any settings on purpose, browsing as usual (click here and there).
Most probaly pressing some combination unintentionally caused this. Browser starts normally, when mouse
hovers any part of the toolbars, menu, addresbar etc. fonts in that section change into squares
(undisplayable fonts i guess). Seems like an encoding problem. Here's a screenshot:




My default encoding is utf-8 (tr_tr). İnteresting point is: only "şi" part of the word "ekşi"
is displayed correctly on te 5th tab. "ş" is a two byte unicode character. but the 2nd
word "sözlük" on the same tab is completely boxes, where "ö" and "ü" are also two bytes characters.

Any suggestions?

Change the fonts?

It' not related to fonts, for i did not change the fonts.

Running opera from the console gives the following error when
any event related to interface fonts triggered (and then the characters turn into boxes) :

Failed to open VDPAU backend libvdpau_nvidia.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I don't have nvidia in my laptop. It seems that this build being linked to libvdpau_nvidia
is the problem. Ah! I remember that i made an apt-get upgrade a few days ago (8-9 days maybe)
then i rebooted my laptop the day before, and this problem occured.

Though i opened/closed opera gazillion times after the upgrade, it broke after the reboot.
My lousy guess is: libvdpau_nvidia.so was a part of some package before the upgrade, but is not anymore.
It still existed after the upgrade, for some program used it, but got removed during the reboot by the package manager.

Whatever vdpau is ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDPAU

Hmm ... most likely related to Gstreamer then (Opera uses gstreamer to play HTML5 video), though why it should call gstreamer for UI events is beyond me ...

I jumped to conclusion too early

Chracters changed back to normal for seemingly no reason. I had 3 open tabs, opened another site that i frequently visit and characters suddenly displayed correctly for that tab, then everything displayed as boxes are displayed correctly now. No updates, no setting changes, no new installation. Intresting.

@sgunhouse thanks for help

I have the same problem. It appeared once, I reinstalled Opera, purged the configuration files, setting up everything from start. Same problem appeared after upgrading to 12.02, but until now it only happens on one website. When I open that particular website, every character turns to squares, even the Opera title in the main button. After closing that particular page, every character turns back to normal.

It has to do with sites you visit. It has happened to me a few times, but if you close the tab that started it all returns to normal. I have no idea how this can happen, but it's very frustrating. I'm open to ideas to help troubleshoot it though.

I found out where vdpau is coming from ... Opera uses gstreamer to play HTML5 videos, one of the available gstreamer plugins is for using vdpau for acceleration. My system (Mageia) actually has all the plugins separate, I know when the developers were talking about gstreamer they said the plugins tended to come in only 3 packages rather than the 2 dozen or thereabouts I see in Mageia. Obviously one of the packages Opera recommends must include the vdpau plugin. Whether it is at all related to the issue at hand, I can't guess yet - but that's why it happens. Maybe the "problem tab" has an HTML5 video or audio in it?

Easiest way to find out - find a page you know uses HTML5 video, and see if it causes the problem.

I found this page with google: http://camendesign.com/code/video_for_everybody/test.html. It's supposed to be an html5 video test page, but I don't see the problems mentioned before happening. In fact, as much as I remember, the problematic pages doesn't have videos. Though "something around gstreamer" was also my first thought.

Well, if the video there didn't induce the problem I guess we can say it's unrelated.

Thanks for the link but it didn't cause the problem for me unfortunately.
This one does it though.
http://www.americanidol.com/recaps/season_11/may_23/
There are links to videos on the page, but I can't tell what the type is.
I tried to open dragonfly to inspect it for anything obvious, but it seems to even infect the ui elements of dragonfly so I can't identify the menu items. I'm no programmer so I'm not sure if I could figure out anything or not, but maybe someone else will have better luck.

As I said before, closing the page and hovering over any text in the browser that had turned to squares will make it turn back to normal.

In deed, I can confirm that, it happens the same way by me as it does by you, with ui elements, hovering over text and everything! We should do some kind of a bug-report, I just don't know how.

Uses Google webfonts, but works fine here on Mageia (with Opera 12.02 64-bit) ...

Does opera import webpage fonts for use in the UI? The page actually displays correctly which is why it was difficult to find that it was the offender.

I've tried disabling extensions, js, masking as firefox, disabling and clearing cookies, but nothing seems to work. One thing that is weird is when I have ghostery active, you can see it blocking around 8-9 items on the page, then it hesitates and ends up with only 2 items. Kinda like it was bypassed.

I need to find a way to step through the loading of the page somehow. It only happens about 2/3 into loading the page.

Error console had this:

Linked script not loaded
Linked script not loaded
Linked script not loaded
Linked script not loaded
Uncaught exception: ReferenceError: Undefined variable: COMSCORE

Error thrown at line 1083, column 3 in http://www.americanidol.com/recaps/season_11/may_23/:
    COMSCORE.beacon({ 
Linked script not loaded
Linked script not loaded
Linked script not loaded
Linked script not loaded
Opera has modified the JavaScript on www.americanidol.com (TinyMCE detected. Various fixes applied.). See browser.js for details
Linked script not loaded
Linked script not loaded
Uncaught exception: TypeError: 'a.data.indexOf' is not a function

Error thrown at line 1, column 40 in b(a) in http://d7v0k4dt27zlp.cloudfront.net/assets/capture_client.js:
    if(a.data.indexOf("capture:")!==0)
Uncaught exception: TypeError: 'a.data.indexOf' is not a function

Error thrown at line 1, column 40 in b(a) in http://d7v0k4dt27zlp.cloudfront.net/assets/capture_client.js:
    if(a.data.indexOf("capture:")!==0)

I wish someone from Opera would take a look at this error...
Update: I have the same problem with Google Drive. I noticed that every page I have this problem with has UTF-8 with latin writing system. Though that might not be connected to the problem.

This page has UTF-8, but doesn't specify a writing system ... no, I don't expect those to be related - at least, unless your native writing system is non-Latin. (Any of the Western European languages would use a Latin writing system.)

I'm using English Linux, but with Hungarian keyboard layout.

It could very well be related to the page that causes this using web fonts (fonts downloaded from the Internet instead of present on your own system), and somehow throwing the UI fonts out of Opera's font cache. You should file a bug report at https://bugs.opera.com/wizard/ and mention the web site that causes this on your system.

Thank you, I did as you said!

Could you post a link to the bug?

Here is another sire

http://www.xinotes.org/notes/note/1078/

You mean a link to a screenshot, or a link to a site with which the bug happens?
BTW I also have the bug with this site.

I thought that Opera had a bug system like Launchpad or similar where you can track and add information to it. Maybe they don't. I was going to post that link there so they had more than one reference is all.

Opera's tracker is closed, only Opera staff and testers can access it directly. When you post a report you receive an email address that can be used to update the bug, however you should not post the address publicly since spambots will grab any email address they find on open forums such as this, and so Opera Software has had to close some bugs due to spamming of the email address. (They copy the information into a new bug when they do this of course, but still it's more unnecessary work for them.)

Having said that ... I am a tester, after a search his bug is DSK-374393.

The "xrdb -query | grep Xft" command gives me no output whatsoever. My distro is Xubuntu 12.04, though I don't know what "exact" version number do you want.

The only detail in the thread that looks moderately interesting so far was the "writing system" remark here (and of course that his own writing system is not Latin) ... it would appear that when a page is trying to change the user's writing system it is messing up how the entire program (and not just that one tab) handles fonts.

Yes, "Xubuntu 12.04" was the information he wanted there.

Seems to me Xft has been incorporated into X now, I think question 1 is no longer meaningful for most systems.

Originally posted by sgunhouse:

Seems to me Xft has been incorporated into X now, I think question 1 is no longer meaningful for most systems.

The information is still interesting, because if you have those settings they still help decide your font rendering settings. But the output of opera -debugfont is more useful nowadays (because it lists all the settings that Opera has picked up). I think that was different at the time that article was written.