Re: Sid & Openoffice (user interface font not working)

[Warren Dodge <warren.dodge@akamail.com>]

This one time, at band camp, Florent Rougon said:
(Friday 13 September 2002 10:55 am)

> I would suggest /usr/lib/X11/fonts/TrueType instead. It avoids having to
> create the symlinks mentioned above and is what is expected by the
> msttcorefonts package (see :
>   http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?archive=3Dno\&bug=3D135862
> for more details). One may infer other fonts packages also expect this
> FontPath.
>
> Of course, this works because msttcorefonts creates links for every font
> it installs from /usr/lib/X11/fonts/TrueType/$font to
> /usr/share/fonts/truetype/$font. I don't know if this is the case with
> all your /usr/share/fonts/truetype fonts.

That's what happened with the latest msttcorefonts package. Those of us with 
this problem don't have the symlinks from
   /usr/lib/X11/fonts/TrueType/$font ->
   /usr/share/fonts/truetype/$font
Those symlinks would accomplish the same thing as the three mentioned before 
regarding encodings.dir, fonts.dir, and fonts.scale. But if msttcorefonts, 
defoma, and other packages expect the links for each font file instead, and 
want to use the /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TrueType path, that is probably a 
better workaround.

Actually, I just studied the "update-ms-fonts" script in the msttcorefonts 
packages, both 1.0.1 and 1.1.0. The newer package script comments out the code 
that creates the symlinks with the note "This should be handled by defoma 
now" and calls 
"/usr/lib/defoma-font reregister-all /etc/defoma/hints/msttcorefonts.hints". 
Obviously something has gotten lost in the translation... I can't find 
anything in the defoma docs about it setting up links.

Here's an updated workaround:
* Remove these links if you have them:
  /usr/share/fonts/truetype/encodings.dir ->
     /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TrueType/encodings.dir
  /usr/share/fonts/truetype/fonts.dir ->
     /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TrueType/fonts.dir
  /usr/share/fonts/truetype/fonts.scale ->=20
     /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TrueType/fonts.scale
* uncomment the lines (175-179) that create the links in
     /usr/sbin/update-ms-fonts
* comment the lines (182-186) that remove the links in
     /usr/sbin/update-ms-fonts
* run /usr/sbin/update-ms-fonts This will create the links
* return 'FontPath "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/TrueType" ' to XF86Config-4=20
* return 'dir "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/TrueType" ' to XftConfig
* restart X

This workaround is better than the previous one, because it leaves your system 
in a state closer to the way it should be. When the msttcorefonts package is 
updated in the future it should just start working again transparently.

I've filed a bug against msttcorefonts, but don't have the number yet.

Warren