-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- On Wed, 03 Jun 1998, Kevin Atkinson wrote: >Is there any way to make all X fonts say 1.5 times bigger than they are >now? > >If not does anyone know who to make netscapes fonts bigger, in areas >such as >the message list. > >My major complaint about debian is that it doesn't provide any real eazy >way >to customize X-Windows. > >Thanks. There is a really easy (Debian) way of adding True Type font support to your X server. All you need to do is to get the xfstt package, create a /var/ttfonts directory, copy the fonts you would like to have into it, add FontPath "unix/:7100" to the "Files" Section of your XF86Config file (/etc/X11/XF86Config) and start the xfstt just a little before X. I did this by modifying the xfs startup script in /etc/init.d (see atachment). Just copy it to /etc/init.d and type (as root) update-rc.d xfsFontPath "unix/:7100" tt defaults and you should have True Type fonts for Netscape, etc. . In case something does not work, have a look at the help file I enclosed. Chris - -- Stone's Law: One man's "simple" is another man's "huh?" - -- ================================== Christian Zander * web: ishmael.ml.org/~zander * email: czander@okay.net ================================== -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3ia Charset: noconv iQCVAwUBNXV97btAzGtVrTsdAQGydwP+JZPIrDE/kZUfNd5PoGAQLcRJGjjyIWaM yPyi46JUgT9l27pzFvU7DZwYKF2hvUtHFXBopTSVKlcJ46VELUcZUITpha6i72Ca esdVOaBXQ2a7p5cePYjfVvdZYtW7bsQVSS/3FBM1/mw2ruNuutL1m+ur+tqCHns/ /lyP9xtSF14= =4U2u -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Attachment:
xfstt
Description: application/shellscript
1.0 What is xfstt? 1.1 How do I test it? 1.2 How do I use it? 2.0 It doesn't work! I get something like "fontpath not found"! 2.1 The X11 server doesn't start when xfstt isn't running! 2.2 Xfstt locks up my machine! 2.3 Why are no fonts included? Where do I get some? 2.4 How does one add fonts? 2.5 What are these weird fontnames displayed by xlsfonts when using xfstt? 2.6 Why shouldn't I serve fonts via tcpip to my friends overseas? 2.7 Why does program xxx look awful with most *.ttf fonts? 2.8 Big font sizes don't work, some glyphs look like garbage! 2.9 I cannot see all of my gazillion installed fonts! 2.10 Why can't I use all 16bit characters? 2.11 Rotated glyphs have wrong spacing! 2.12 The glyphs are too small! 2.13 How does one request an encoding different from iso8859-1? 3.0 How do I put fonts in categories? 3.1 use with java (tm) 3.2 use with netscape/communicator (tm) 3.3 use with staroffice (tm) 3.4 How do I print documents which use *.ttf fonts? 3.5 Does xfstt have anti-aliasing/grayscaling technology? 4.0 I have problems to compile xfstt! 4.1 Will it be merged with the X server? 4.2 How are embedded *ttf fonts used? 4.3 How can I help? 4.4 Why the LGPL licence though xfstt is not a library? ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1.0 What is xfstt? Xfstt means "X11 Font Server for TT fonts". TT fonts are generally regarded to be the best scalable fonts for low resolution devices like displays. Examples where good scalable fonts improve the visual quality considerably are netscape(tm), gimp and java(tm). A fonts.properties file for use with java is provided. Xfstt is freely available under the LGPL. This basically means: Use it for free; if you fix bugs you have to contribute the fixes to the public. 1.1 How do I test it? mkdir /usr/ttfonts and put some *ttf fonts there, now run make xfstt && make install xfstt --sync xfstt & xset fp+ unix/:7100 xlsfonts xcoral -fn "TTM20_Times New Roman" xfontsel -pattern "-*-*-*-*-*-tt-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*" xset -fp unix/:7100 If your X server cannot handle the unix protocol replace the unix/:7100 part by inet/127.0.0.1:7100 (assuming the machine running xfstt has 127.0.0.1 as internet address). 1.2 How do I use it? Add unix/:7100 to the fontpath in your X11 configuration file. Start xfstt a few seconds before starting X11. The font name for a 24 point Arial would be "TTM24_Arial" or "-ttf-arial-medium-r-normal-tt-18-240-75-75-p-123-iso8859-1", whichever of both naming conventions you find more convenient. Using xfstt's fontpath as the first fontpath is not a good idea: If the first truetype font would be a symbol/dingbat/wingdings font, the default font would be very hard to read (it sure looks interesting though :-) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2.0 It doesn't work! I get something like "bad font path"! A font server needs a fair chance to offer font services to clients. If you start the font server and the X server at the same time there are chances the background app fs doesn't get a time slice before the X server looks at it's font paths. In some situations xfstt needs to rebuild it's font database which may take some extra seconds. If "xset fp+ unix/:7100" fails while running X it always turned out xfstt wasn't started! Please check this with the "ps" command. If it hasn't started, start it now. If you are running the font server on a machine that has a different byte order than the client machine then it works as designed. Move the font server to a machine with the correct byte order. 2.1 The X11 server doesn't start when xfstt isn't running! This usually happens when "unix/:7100" is in the font path. Despite xfstt's marvellous capabilities it cannot do anything when it isn't running. 2.2 Xfstt locks up my machine! Sorry about that. Xfstt itself cannot lock up the machine. The X server that stops handling user requests is to blame. If you are a developer please add this your TODO list... 2.3 Why are no fonts included? Where do I get some? Free fonts have the wierdest copyrights one can imagine. A typical restriction is "non-commercial use only". Including such fonts in the package would prevent xfstt from being put on CDROMs. *.ttf fonts are often included as bonus for printers, word processors, graphics applications, operating systems,... There are a lot of cheap CDs with hundreds of *.ttf fonts. http://www.winsite.com/win3/fonts/truetype/index.html http://www.microsoft.com/truetype http://www.hooked.net/~flubble/typography.html http://home1.gte.net/tiaralyn/pctt.htm http://www.homunculus.com/access/CustomDirs/Fonts.html http://indigo.simplenet.com/fontz http://www.pagesz.net/~mhare/fonts/index.htm http://klink.net/~rcklueg/font1.html http://www.fonthead.com/main.html http://members.aol.com/ChiChiX/pages/fonts.html http://moon.yerphi.am/~hovik/Archive/Archive-PC/Fonts http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/7554/downloads/fonts and many many other web sites 2.4 How does one add fonts? Copy *.ttf fonts into the /usr/ttfonts directory or put some softlinks to font directories in there. A typical example is ln -s /DOS/windows/fonts /usr/ttfonts/winfonts Now run "xfstt --sync" in order to have the new fonts recognized. Adding fonts while xfstt is running doesn't work yet. 2.5 What are these weird fontnames displayed by xlsfonts when using xfstt? xlsfonts results while running xfstt look like: TTUP020206030504050203040Times New Roman The reason is that the X11 Font Server protocol does not provide a way to query typographic information about fonts. So the only way to provide this information without changing this protocol is to "sideband" the typographic info into the fontname. The typographic info provided by xfstt is the panose information. For details of the panose specification have a look at http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Fonts/Panose/pan2.html 2.6 Why shouldn't I serve fonts to my friends overseas via tcpip? Remote font serving is only partially implemented (only one connection, same byte order for X and fs server). Since some X11 Servers only know the inet protocol for font servers, now both the inet and the unix protocol are supported. There still is the restriction that the CPU running the X server and the CPU running the font server must have the same byte order. If you absolutely need to serve fonts to multiple other machines (they MUST have the same byte order as the font server) you should start xfstt on another port (e.g. xfstt --port 7101) and add unix/:7101 to the catalogue of the standard X11 font server xfs. Make sure you conform to the font licence when serving to multiple clients. 2.7 Why does program xxx look awful with most *.ttf fonts? Most *.ttf fonts are proportional (i.e. 'W' is wider than 'i'). Due to the sad history of font support in X11 many X programs only know how handle monospaced fonts. It may be possible to also serve monospaced versions of proportional fonts. This feature is not implemented yet. Since this will probably cause problems with ttf hinting, the monospaced version will most likely not match the quality of the original proportional font. Good ideas how to avoid this effect are welcome. 2.8 Big font sizes don't work, some glyphs look like garbage! The X11 font server protocol limits replies to 256kB. If a font is scaled with a big size the glyph bitmaps may not fit into 256kB. One would have to split up the reply. Many popular X11 servers do not handle split up replies yet. Xfstt tries to serve as many glyphs as possible. If there is no room left in the 256kB it skips the remaining characters. Since the X server already made up his opinion how big these "phantom glyphs" are, it tries to display something: garbage In this case the X server should be started with the options -deferglyphs 8 -deferglyphs 16 Then the X server will load characters only in groups of 16, not all at once. The maximum size of the glyphs is still finite, but they will have some more room. 2.9 I cannot see all of the gazillion fonts I installed! The X11 font server protocol limits replies to 256 KB. If a font name list would exceed this limit one would have to split up the reply. Many popular X11 servers cannot handle split up replies yet. 2.10 Why can't I use all 16bit characters? Some popular X11 servers cannot handle split up replies yet, but they request data for all characters they are told about. A reply of 24bytes * 64k chars far exceeds this limit and this causes trouble. Serving unicodes < 256 is default; if you are ready to take the risk of 16bit chars use the --unstrap option for xfstt and the "-deferglyphs 16" option for the X11 server. 2.11 Rotated glyphs have wrong spacing! The X11 font server protocol only supports x advance widths, not y advance widths. Xfstt takes the XCharStruct.attributes field to pass y advance widths. No current X server uses this information to display rotated strings. 2.12 The glyphs are too small! Most operating systems handling ttf fonts assume default resolutions of 96dpi, 120dpi or higher. Most X servers tell Xfstt to assume a default resolution of 72 dpi. A 12pt font at 96dpi is the same as a 16pt font at 72dpi. The solution is to tell the X server that the default resolution is different from the default 72 dpi. As long as there is no such option in XFree xfstt will provide the --res option. A typical usage example is xfstt --res 96 2.13 How does one request an encoding different from iso8859-1? By default xfstt uses the unicode encoding which accidentially matches the iso8859-1 encoding for the first 256 characters. Starting in version 0.9.8 the unicode can be remapped to other encodings with the --encoding option. Example xfstt --encoding iso8859-2,koi8-r,windows-1251 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3.0 How do I put fonts in categories? Create some subdirectories in /usr/ttfonts, e.g. modern, script, brush, old, symbol, ... and put the appropiate fonts in there. The corresponding font names will be -modern-*, -script-*, -brush-* and so on 3.1 use with java (tm) 1.1 and up Overwrite the fonts.properties file in $JAVA_HOME/lib/ 3.2 use with netscape (tm) Since X11 netscape 3 doesn't use scrollable listboxes for font selection having more than a dozen *ttf fonts makes selecting fonts difficult. Netscape 4 needs a while to sort the fonts if several hundreds are installed. Netscape has the bad habit of not closing fonts when they are no longer used. As the number of open fonts is finite after some font changes requests for opening more fonts are rejected. 3.3 use with staroffice (tm) Starting in version 0.9.8 xfstt recognizes the not 100% compliant staroffice request for fonts with "-*" names. When using an older xfstt version you can't access its fonts in staroffice. 3.4 How do I print documents which use *.ttf fonts? Unfortunately the X Consortium decided in its early days that the display and printer are totally unrelated devices. There was no common architecture for graphics devices. The recent approach to close this gaping architectual hole is to use a X Print Server. Another way is to use ghostscript's ability to render ttf fonts. In order to help ghostscript figure out which fonts are available the --gslist option was added to xfstt. Usage example xfstt --gslist --sync > gs-ttf-list 3.5 Does xfstt have anti-aliasing/grayscaling technology? The font engine in xfstt knows grayscaling. Unfortunately neither the X11 font server protocol nor most X11 servers allow grayscaled fonts. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4.0 I have problems to compile xfstt! xfstt is supposed to compile right out of the box. If the error message says something about missing include files make sure that you have a package xdevel or similar installed. If this doesn't help get a binary release (e.g. from the great debian distribution). 4.1 Will it be merged with the X server? Merging it with the X server creates some opportunities. It makes advanced features like grayscaling, kerning, glyph substitution, ligatures, unlimited glyph sizes and vertical advance widths for rotated text possible. It would also allow that only those glyphs that are actually needed have to be rendered. Currently all glyphs in a font have to be rendered in order to get almost useless font summary properties. Fonts with lots of glyphs take considerably longer than they should take because of this. Unfortunately this requires a major rewrite of the X11 font subsystem. But without the rewrite it is doubtful that X11 will be a competitive solution in the next millenium. 4.2 How are embedded *ttf fonts used? xfstt doesn't fully support dynamic adding/removing fonts yet. This is a prerequisite for handling embedded fonts. The intermediate solution is to send a FS_SetCatalogues request to xfstt which makes it rebuild its font database. 4.3 How can I help? Xfstt is reported to work on i386/m68k/sparc/alpha/mips/ppc on linux/freebsd/aix/irix platforms. Porting it to a different platform may require small modifications in the architecture dependent header file "arch.h". Read in 4.1 about the great benefits that could be achieved by deeply embedding scalable font technology into a completely revised X11 font subsystem. Read and understand the limitations of the current X11 font subsystem and try to do something about it. 4.4 Why the LGPL licence though xfstt is not a library? It is an (almost) trivial exercise to combine parts of the package into a library. The LGPL licence has considerable benefits for developers using libraries.