Troubleshooting

Below is a table of error messages with explanations and possible workarounds to assist with troubleshooting.

Missing fonts

If you are running Linux and do not have the msttcorefonts package installed, you may see the following error message from Prince:

prince: internal error: no fallback glyph for character U+00XX

The workaround for this error is to install the msttcorefonts package or redefine the CSS generic font families to use different TrueType fonts by editing the fonts.css file in the Prince installation. See the fonts documentation for more information about redefining the CSS generic font families.

Fontconfig

Prince uses the Fontconfig library on Linux systems to search for installed system fonts. Fontconfig is installed as a standard component on most desktop Linux distributions such as Ubuntu and recent versions of Red Hat Linux.

If you are running an older Linux distribution that did not come with Fontconfig pre-installed, such as Red Hat 7.2, you may see the following error message from Prince:

Fontconfig error: Cannot load default config file

This error will usually be followed by errors relating to missing fonts that cannot be found due to the absence of Fontconfig.

The workarounds for this error are to either install Fontconfig or redefine the CSS generic font families to use TrueType fonts that are specified directly by their filenames, avoiding the need to use Fontconfig at all. See the fonts documentation for more information about redefining the CSS generic font families.

Image formats

Prince supports JPEG, PNG, TIFF and GIF images. If you try to format a document that includes images in a format that is not supported by Prince, such as BMP, you may see the following error message from Prince:

prince: ./picture.bmp: warning: Unknown image format

The workaround for this error is to convert the image file into a format that is supported by Prince such as PNG, which is a well-supported standard image format with high-quality lossless compression.