Documentation ------------- Have a look at the "XOSD Guide and Reference" at http://ldots.org/xosd-guide/. If you really want a Debian package of it, file a RFP or wishlist bug. Fonts and locales ----------------- For full unicode, you need a lot of glyphs. Since many old fonts only include glyphs for ASCII or ISO-8859-*, this is a major problem. X11 does therefor use multiple fonts to combine them to a FontSet. Most of the time you needn't have a full set of all unicode glyphs, but only use a small subset. This subset depends on your locale setting, which specified which glyphs must be available for a FontSet to be complete. Therefor you should use wildcards in your font-specification, else X11 might not be able to find all required glyphs and doesn't create a font at all. It's a good idea to install additional fonts with other encodings, for example, the xfonts-{75dpi,100dpi,base}-transcoded are a good idea. If it still doesn't work, try to revert back to an non-UTF8 (LANG=de_DE) encoding or use good old ASCII (LANG=C). Even if you don't call any X11 functions directly, you're doing so indirectly via XOSD. Therefor you HAVE TO initialize the locale in any application using XOSD, since XOSD can't do that itself: It would overwrite any setting done by your application. Therefor put something like the following code in you program before calling xosd_create(): if (setlocale(LC_ALL, "") == NULL || !XSupportsLocale()) fprintf(stderr, "Locale not available, expect problems with fonts.\n");