Strange gdb behavior when debugging Qt apps

[Αλέξανδρος Καρυπίδης (Alexandros Karypidis)]

So far noone has mentioned anything in the Qt mailing list.  Moreover, I 
tried running gdb against standard qt apps (like qtcups) and the fonts were 
ok, so it's probably not the environment.

Furthermore, it seems that this is thread-related, because it occurs only 
with applications spawning other threads.  For example, I ran gdb with qtella 
(a Qt gnutella client which spawns threads) and had the same "garbled fonts" 
problem.

More specifically, when gdb's output contains somethin like:

"[New Thread XXXX (LWP YYYYY)]"

Then, the fonts are garbled...

> > I am facing a rather strange problem using gdb.  I have written a simple
> > Qt application which creates a window with a few menu choices.  When I
> > run the application (no debugging), everything is ok.  If I try to run it
> > within gdb however, the fonts used are unreadable.  They letters are very
> > small and one cannot distinguish them.  Does anyone have any clue
> > regading this strange behavior?
>
> In the course of starting up the process to be debugged, gdb invokes
> the shell.  Could it be that a .bashrc, .cshrc, or the like is setting
> (or unsetting) an environment variable which is influencing the font
> size?