GLMakie font rendering issue on latest Ubuntu

[jipolanco]

After upgrading to Ubuntu 22.04, I'm having font rendering issues when using GLMakie:

using GLMakie
fig = Figure()
ax = Axis(fig[1, 1]; xlabel = "x", ylabel = "y", title = "Title")
fig

Unfortunately I'm not familiar enough with OpenGL to identify the issue, and I'm also not quite sure about how to provide a reproducer.

I tested both on Makie 0.16.6 and master, using Julia 1.8-beta3. I also tested using software rendering (using xvfb) and got the same results, so I'm not sure if it's a graphics driver issue. In any case, here's an extract of my glxinfo:

Extended renderer info (GLX_MESA_query_renderer):
    Vendor: Intel (0x8086)
    Device: Mesa Intel(R) UHD Graphics 620 (WHL GT2) (0x3ea0)
    Version: 22.0.1
    Accelerated: yes
    Video memory: 3072MB
    Unified memory: yes
    Preferred profile: core (0x1)
    Max core profile version: 4.6
    Max compat profile version: 4.6
    Max GLES1 profile version: 1.1
    Max GLES[23] profile version: 3.2
OpenGL vendor string: Intel
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa Intel(R) UHD Graphics 620 (WHL GT2)
OpenGL core profile version string: 4.6 (Core Profile) Mesa 22.0.1
OpenGL core profile shading language version string: 4.60

I also tested different fonts (making sure they were available) with no success. Besides, things work correctly with CairoMakie, so I don't think it's a font issue.

I also tested on a different system (with Fedora 36), which has the same Mesa and OpenGL versions and a slightly older integrated Intel GPU, and everything works just fine.

---

FWIW, I also managed to build and run this OpenGL font rendering tutorial (code here), which I think uses FreeType and GLFW. Text from the tutorial renders just fine on my system.

[jipolanco]

It seems to be an issue with my own compiled version of Julia (tested on 1.7.2 and 1.8-beta3). I don't use any special flags (all USE_SYSTEM_* are disabled, which is the default), so I'm a bit surprised. I'll update in case i identify the problem, in case anyone has the same issue.

The issue doesn't occur when I use the official binaries (and wipe the Julia depot), so I'm closing this.

[ffreyer]

In case more people run into this: It might also be enough to empty .julia/makie. Those files hold the cached font data, which should get regenerated on using Makie

[SimonDanisch]

Hm, that's weird, since there is a try catch around the serialization, so if that fails due to Julia changing its format, it should delete that file itself and re-generate it.