I have built cairo 1.6.4 using MacPorts. I am using the Quartz (no X11) backend on Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger). When I run an application (e.g., gimp, inkscape or gnumeric) all of the text displayed by the application is replaced by small boxes. As it loads, the application prints: (gimp:11700): Pango-WARNING **: shaping failure, expect ugly output. shape-engine='BasicEngineFc', font='Bitstream Vera Sans 10', text='Plug-In Interpreters' This has been reproduced by several users and reported to the MacPorts cairo maintainer, see http://trac.macports.org/ticket/15052. It has also been discussed briefly on gtk-i18n-list, see http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-i18n-list/2008-April/msg00004.html. Note that the suggested fix, "fc-cache -f" does not work.
The message means your Pango is using the freetype font backend. Which means that it's not using the atsui/quartz font backend because of misconfiguration during pango's or cairo's configure. As for the problem with the fontconfig backend, most probably you don't have any fonts set up with fontconfig.
Closing bug as it was the result of a build misconfiguration. Please see http://trac.macports.org/ticket/15052 for the configuration parameters I used to get cairo / quartz to display fonts properly on Mac OS X 10.4. Thank you Behdad.
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