TrueType Font Guide feedback
Thanks for making this available; I used the one for 4.x, as I used
the earlier one. It's very helpful.
There was one point in the instructions I got a little lost. It's in
section 5.1 "The next subject of interest is where the .alias file
should be put." You then refer to the .scale file belong in
/etc/X11/fonts/TrueType.
For those of us who didn't install the debian package, this directory
does not exist. I'm probably fairly typical: I figured I'd use the
fonts already on my drive, since I boot several OSs.
So you need an instruction to create that directory, and then you need
to say what files should be moved or copied there. I copied both of
the fonts.* files I just created. This meant that when I executed the
rm you gave, I was left with a .scale file in the directory. I
suspect that was not the intent.
By the way, the .scale file had entries that were not iso8859-1 (e.g.,
-3).
Then the next problem comes in 5.3 at update-fonts-alias. For this to
work with an argument of TrueType requires /usr/lib/X11/fonts/TrueType
to exist. I made a symlink to the directory I started with.
Now, here are a few other observations.
wine kept crashing on me until I deleted the linotype-palatino fonts
from the /usr/lib/X11/fonts/TrueType/fonts.dir (copied to
fonts.scale). Apparently this is an X bug, but it might be good to
let people know.
Users previously using xfstt will want to remove the 7101 server from
their XF86Config-4.
I think that to get the new path to work you not only need to modify
FontPath in XF86Config.-4, but you need to add this path to the list
in /etc/X11/fs/config for catalogue. In fact, if I understand
correctly, the XF86Config-4 entry may be optional as long as you have
something at 7100 for the font server.
Since the server now has freetype built in, I'm not sure if running
the font server separately has any value (at least for a local
machine). Any clarification of that would be helpful.
The whole X setup seems to have a lot of redundancy (e.g., *.dir
and *.scale), which is asking for trouble. I don't know if there's
anything you can say about it that would help, though.
For some reason after I finished fooling around my xman reverted to a
non-proportional font (maybe because I was finally getting the Courier
font the app defaults called for). The thing that makes it strange is
that when I first got xfstt working with XFree86 v 3, the manual pages
went from non-propotional to proportional. Not only did it look
better, but the default window was wide enough to hold the page width
(a pet peeve of mine with xman on every system--Linux, Sun, HP--I've
used). Anyway, it might be worth letting people know they can fool
with such things in, e.g., /etc/X11/app-defaults/Xman.
When I configured NS (Mozilla, actually) as described in part 7 the
choices actually appeared as Monotype-arial black. Do you want to
make a recommendation for the serif fonts, e.g., monotype-times new
roman?
A couple lines on exactly how and when to restart the font server and
the X server would be good. I was concerned doing so would kill my
session, so I just logged out and then back in. I'm also not sure
whether, e.g., /etc/init.d/xfs reload is adequate, or if restart is
necessary.
I've focussed on areas that were unclear to me, or where some more
info might be helpful. I don't want to leave the wrong impression
though: it's a very helpful guide. Thanks.
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