On 07/04/2019 16:14, oliver wrote:

WARNING: Font family '"Celeste' not found, using default (DejaVu Sans Mono)

Small": can't open
-font-size: can't open
12: can't open
-font-weight: can't open
normal: can't open
(Tcl) UNHANDLED ERROR: extra characters after close-quote
    while executing
"pdtk_startup_dialog .gfxstub5648e27e9080 0 "-font-face "C"
    ("uplevel" body line 7)
    invoked from within
"uplevel #0 $docmds"

from that point on PD doesn't respond to anything anymore.

Dear Oliver

I think you are right: it must be the parsing of the settings file. If I change the settings and then start with a simple "pd", I get the first part of the error, but not the Tcl error, and Pd seems to work fine. However, trying to go into the settings via the GUI — to remove the troublesome entry — did elicit the dreaded red Tcl error and locked things up.

I think I was hasty in my assumptions about how Pd finds fonts. If Pd fails over to asking for Courier, it will indeed load whatever font the name "Courier" is an alias for in fontconfig (possibly through a chain of aliases). However, aliases cannot be counted on to work in every other situation. (I had a lot more waffle here, but even I didn’t want to read it.)

Hacking the font metadata (e.g. in FontForge) so that the family name doesn’t contain spaces does work, but that is a ridiculously cumbersome solution.

Just as "pd -font-face "font name with spaces"" (yes, ordinary straight double quotes) works from the command line, it works in shell scripts, too, so that is probably the best bet for now, no?

Best

-- 
matthew brandi | 020 8882 4616