On Monday 07 July 2003 11:43 am, Peter Evans wrote:
Warning: gormless newbie again! In brief: can I please have an idjit-level explanation of how to install new fonts?
Jason writes (in the thread "8.2 slower than Windows 2000 on 450MHz
PIII?") apropos of my konsole display irritations:
I had this problem until I changed the font. In Konsole, Settings->Font->Custom. Works fine for me with Bitstream Vera Sans Mono. Don't forget to click on Settings->Save Settings to make the change permanent.
I don't think that's the key to fixing my irritation, but anyway a spot of Googling took me to some pages that made this font look very interesting. So I got it, within a bz2 file that I've opened up on my capacious hard drive.
Well, when I first installed 8.2, the default Konsole font rendered lines all over the place (e.g. while using the console version of Yast)... setting it up with another monospaced font fixed the character and line alignment problems. YMMV. ;-) You may also try experimenting with some of the other settings in Konsole, too.
Righty-ho, what do I do with the fonts therein? (I need to know, because right now I only have a single Japanese font installed, and desperately want a "gosikku" and "maru-gosikku" alternatives.) Earlier, I installed Trebuchet MS and Georgia using what I thought was common sense and a spot of enterprise; they're kind-of installed, but they look terrible. (Not aliased, perhaps?) I infer that I did it wrongly and should instead have followed some kosher procedure. The 8.2 Personal user guide suggests that this is done via KDE Control Center | System Administration | Font Installer; but all I see here is a list of already-installed fonts; there's no obvious way to tell it to look at the content of such-and-such a directory. The explanation toward the end of "Integrating Additional (True Type) Fonts" in the administration manual very reasonably assumes that I know roughly what I'm doing; unfortunately I don't, so the part about installation is over my head. (The stuff about character sets is fine.) Meanwhile, http://kitschparade.ath.cx/vera.php says "Newer distributions [of Linux] can use fontconfig to install Bitstream Vera", but when I look at man:fontconfig I've only the haziest idea of what it's on about.
Urgh. Maybe I should have settled for "Lindows" or that other OS. . . .
Fonts under X Window has a chequered and complex history. Truetype, especially. But it is a lot easier than it has been in the past! But there's still a lot of old information floating about which is confusing. If you like a GUI, check out the KDE font installer in the control centre. I'm running a default KDE control centre which differs from the SuSE version - In mine, it's in the System Administration section. It's quite straightforward to use. Go into Administrator mode if you want your fonts available for all users on your system (a good idea). I prefer to use the konsole (sorry!). Install the fonts using the following procedure: cd to the directory where you downloaded the fonts su to root. cp *.ttf /usr/lib/X11/fonts/truetype/ fonts-config HTH, Jason