[xiphos-users] lack of text display on some platforms

[Karl Kleinpaste]

This is an FYI for users who have recently seen(sometime in Fedora 38/39 
or Debian 11 timelines) that Xiphos does not display text properly in 
its text widgets. Xiphos starts, no error messages are seen, menus and 
buttons show text normally, but the text windows for Bible, commentary, 
dictionary, and genbook content are blank.

The text is present, but the lack of display is a regression in recent 
WebKit, the toolkit which drives these widgets. It's not a Xiphos bug, 
and the WK bug is specific to nvidia-enabled machines. Workarounds for 
the moment are to set either of these environment variables before 
starting Xiphos, which prevent WK from engaging certain accelerations in 
nvidia contexts:

WEBKIT_DISABLE_DMABUF_RENDERER=1
WEBKIT_DISABLE_COMPOSITING_MODE=1

I suggest the latter because it works in more circumstances; the former 
isn't successful in certain virtualized environments.

If a WK fix isn't forthcoming sometime soon, we'll make a fix that does 
the above ourselves, internal to Xiphos. But we'd like to think that WK 
people will take care of this soon.
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