On Fri, 2004-01-23 at 21:48, Von Fugal wrote:
> I've been digging all over about how to load more fonts into the X font
> server, and have found some quick and painless techniques for installing
> your own fonts. First put them in a directory, and run mkfontscale if you
> have any ttf's then mkfontdir. Then you simply put
> xset +fp /path/to/fontdir/
> in .xsession or something like it. This works great except one problem,
> which is what I'm seeking help on. The fonts contained in said directory
> show up in xfontsel and in a few apps (gimp and ooffice are the only two
> I've found them in, and ooffice only on school computers and not at work)
> but I have found no way to get at the fonts in other apps, most desirably
> gaim, mozilla, and gvim. Does anyone know what might be the problem here, or
> how to get around this nuisance? Any ideas would be appreciated.
> --

What you are seeing is the effect of having 2 dominant font systems at
work.  The old corefonts system, which fewer and fewer apps use, and the
new xft font system, which gtk2 apps use.

A note on OpenOffice first:  OpenOffice fonts work a little differently
from both the corefonts mechanism and the xft mechanism.  Basically
OpenOffice does it's own font rendering using freetype to open, process
and display fonts from ttf files directly.  It does not use the font
server at all.  However, it does not currently use the fontconfig info
(/etc/fonts/fonts.conf) that xft uses to determine font paths.  Instead,
it gets the font path from the corefonts font server and then uses that
merely as a pointer to the ttf fonts on disk.  This is a little bit of a
nuisance if you're trying to run open office remotely and your local
font path doesn't exist on the remote machine.  So for openoffice, you
use the corefonts mechanism to specify the path.

XFT is a much better font system.  It's client-side, rather than
server-side, and does not require a font server.  Global font paths for
XFT are stored in /etc/fonts/fonts.conf usually.  All Xft-enabled apps
use the xft library which uses this conf file.  You can check the
current font list that xft sees with "fc-list."  To add local user
fonts, it's ridiculously easy.  Just add fonts (I typically symlink them
from a windows share on dual-boot machines) to $HOME/.fonts and then run
"fc-cache."  After that, all the fonts are picked up by all xft apps
(kde or gnome apps for example). 

Hope this helps.

Michael

ps the commands are fc-cache and fc-list without the period or quotes.


> Von Fugal
> 
> 
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-- 
Michael Torrie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

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