Re: Why are so many people using font servers?
On Mon, May 12, 2003 at 07:00:58PM +0200, Thomas Hood wrote:
> Some people have said that they find fonts confusing in Debian.
> Here is what I wrote about fonts & Debian on my page about
> Debian GNU/Linux on a ThinkPad 600:
> (http://panopticon.csustan.edu/thood/tp600lnx.htm#secfnt)
OK, very helpful, thanks a lot for this effort. Some tangential comments
and questions follow.
> Fonts
> =====
>
> First, read the Font-HOWTO in the documentation directory.
>
> XFree86 4 handles both Type 1 and truetype fonts. To install a font by
> hand, what you need to do is stick your font files in a directory
> somewhere, create the fonts.dir file in that directory, and add the
> directory's path to the font path specified in XF86Config-4.
>
> Where should you put your font files? Well, Debian hasn't straightened
> this out yet, so in the meantime chaos reigns.
Yep! Very helpful to see this clearly expressed. Just knowing that this
is the state of affairs is Useful and Good information.
{snip}
> Storing the fonts in /usr/share/fonts/... and using defoma to set up
> symlinks for various font-using apps, in the manner of msttcorefonts,
> ttf-thryomanes and ttf-freefont, has been the recent trend. Defoma is
> probably going to be supplanted by fontconfig, however, so more upheaval
> is in store.
This is probably good news, to me at least. If I am not completely
mistaken, 'fontconfig' is the standard on RedHat? Anyway I see
references to it all over but so little that explains DeFoMa. I think I
want a widely-used, widely understood font configuration mechanism that
doesn't leave me utterly dependent on Debian gurus to explain it to me.
This would be a counter-Balkanization development. That's my take as a
newbie.
> Getting fonts
> =============
>
> My XF86Config-4 file lists the fonts I use:
{snip}
> To install additional fonts by hand use the ttmkfdir and mkfontdir
> utilities (from the ttmkfdir and xutils packages, respectively) to
> create the required fonts.dir file.
No matter how man time I do this, I still have a very annoying problem
that is making me emphatically feel (and say) "fonts are messed up on
Debian", even though I know that it might be more accurate to say "KDE
is messed up on Debian" (or just messed up). The problem is that I
cannot get a suitable font to display (be used by) KDE's Konsole
application, which is my shell terminal under X. The choices available
to me when I open the Konsole menu only include TTF and Type1 PS, there
are no bitmapped screen fonts (*.pcf or *.pcf.gz). My Debian
installation has got all these monospaced fonts that I cannot use in
Konsole, therefore. I cannot figure out why and any hints I've run down
using Google have failed to fix this. And I cannot find any
documentation on the KDE applications config file syntax, so I cannot
use a text editor to get in there and manually change the font Konsole
uses (there's an entry like "#Font: 6" in there, I have no idea what
that means or even whether the hash "#" is a comment token or not.
Poop!).
Oh, what's wrong with the font I have got in Konsole, now? The tilde "~"
symbol is rendered in that font as something that looks like a
lightweight hyphen "-" symbol. Very annoying. Any other fonts I try are
rendered in a sub-optimal way (harder to read), i.e. M$/Monotype "andale
mono".
Soren Andersen
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