Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (3254 mails)

[Mike Fabian <mfabian@xxxxxxx>]

Charles Philip Chan <cpchan@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> On Thu. Sep. 19, 2002 at 23:19:54 -0500 GMT, a lone cry was heard from 
> Greg Macek <it-guy@xxxxxxxxxx> in the wasteland called the Internet:
>
>> I've tried this and a lot of other things on my machine (7.3, XF4.2)
>> to get my TTF working again, but no avail. Following the first part of
>> the instructions below gets me a fonts.scale file that is around 26K
>> in size, listing all the fonts in the truetype directory. That's fine.
>> However, fonts.dir is still set to 2 bytes, only containing a "0". 
>
> (1) Go to the directory of your truetype fonts.
>
> (2) Run:
>
> 	ttmkfdir -o fonts.dir

This will be overwritten during the next run of SuSEconfig.

Better use

    ttmkfdir -o fonts.scale.myfonts

Then run SuSEconfig. 

That's not perfect either for various reasons:

   - duplicate lines from fonts.scale.myfonts and other fonts.scale.*
     files will all end up in fonts.dir
   - ttmkfdir's output is sometimes not very good, it may omit
     encodings which are useful, sometimes it adds encodings which
     don't work well, sometimes it makes entries for fonts as
     charcell fonts '-c-' which don't work well as charcell fonts.
     There are many other problems with ttmkfdir ...

You can try mkfontscale instead of ttmkfdir. mkfontscale works better,
but even mkfontscale can't do the job perfectly.  Probably it is
impossible to do the job perfectly automatically.  The author of
mkfontscale wrote me:

> Mapping TrueType and Type 1 font tables to XLFDs is intrinsically an
> underspecified task. 

Therefore we use the current mechanism of generating fonts.scale
out of handedited fonts.scale.something files. These files
were originally created with mkfontscale, but then improved
manually and packaged with the font rpm.

If you add you own fonts, you need to do the same for best results.
Create a fonts.scale.myfonts first with ttmkfdir or mkfontscale.
Then improve it manually if necessary.

I'll try to make the automatic mechanisms work a little bit better in
the future, but that is unfortunately not so easy.

-- 
Mike Fabian   <mfabian@xxxxxxx>   http://www.suse.de/~mfabian
睡眠不足はいい仕事の敵だ。