Re: Font references and info

[Steven Yap <syap@shaw.ca>]

On Wed, 2003-07-09 at 20:34, Aaron wrote:
> On -3359-Wed, Jul 09, 2003 at 08:44:02PM +0200, David Fokkema 
> <dfokkema@ileos.nl> spake thus,
> > 
> > I'll have to take some time to understand fonts. I really don't have a
> > clue... For example, in Knoppix, openoffice.org uses a font for the
> > menus etc. that looks quite good, while in my Sid, it looks ugly as
> > hell.

To get OpenOffice to use a nice anti-aliased font for the application
menus and such, you need to do something rather non-obvious.

Go to Tools | Options ... and select the OpenOffice.org | Font
Replacement view.  Select the "Apply replacement table" check box. Type
"Andale Sans UI" in the combo-box labelled "Font".  Select the
replacement font from the drop-down of the combo-box labelled "Replace
with".  Click on the button with the "check mark" to add the new
replacement entry.  Make sure the "Always" and "Screen" check boxes of
the replacement entry are selected.

This should give you a better looking OpenOffice.org. :)

> This is my current understanding of the basic requirements for
> TrueType fonts in X11:
> 
> 1. Get FreeType (I am using FreeType2, downloaded today).
> 2. Make sure you've got 'Load "freetype"' in XF86Config-4.
> 3. Put all your .ttf files somewhere, and afaik there is no specific
>    location where they have to live.
> 4. Add that path to XF86Config-4 as 'FontPath "/path/to/ttfs/"'
> 5. Run something like ttmkfdir to create the fonts.scale file, and
>    also mkfontdir to create the fonts.dir file within that
>    "/path/to/ttfs" directory.
> 6. Somehow this should magically work.
> 
> I think I'm getting hung up on number 6 ;-) I load xfontsel and take a
> look at the families and I see no verdana ;-(

I let defoma manage the fonts installed on my sid installation.  When
you do that, the your FontPath for TrueType fonts should contain
something like "/var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d/dirs/TrueType".  

So far, all of the fonts I use, and need, have debian packages for
them.  Installing them automatically registers the fonts with defoma
and makes them available to applications.

Xft and FreeType are not font servers.

Xft is a client-side font API for X11 applications.  I believe bitmap
fonts are not made available by default through Xft.  Come to think of
it, I'm not even sure if bitmap fonts can be made available through
Xft.  /etc/fonts/fonts.conf is the configuration file for fontconfing
and it determines what fonts are available to applications through the
Xft API.

Xft uses the fontconfig mechanism to select fonts.  To render the
selected fonts, Xft uses the standard X11 drawing protocol. If the
Render extension is available, that will be used to accelerate the
rendering and reduce network traffic.

See http://fontconfig.org/ for more on Xft and fontconfig

FreeType is a TrueType font renderer.  This is the module you load in
the XF86Config-4 file.  

Hope this shed some light.

-- 
Steven Yap <syap@shaw.ca>