Isam Bayazidi <bayazidi@arabeyes.org> writes:

I am using SuSE 7.3, KDE 3.0.3, XFree86 4.1.0 .. I use the Arabic language in KDE3 so I wanted to get the TrueType fonts that comes with MS-Windows to use for Arabic .. I refered to a HOWTO that explains how to impoert TTFs to SuSE .. it worked BUT it did not define the fonts for the Encoding UTF-8 ( ISO-10646-1) .. it is essensial to define it for UTF-8 as it is the encoding used in KDE3 and GNOME2 ..

Most fonts in KDE3 and GNOME2 are rendered via libXft now, and fonts.dir is not relevant for fonts rendered via Xft. fonts.dir is only important for fonts rendered via the X server. Only with libXft you can get anti-aliasing.

for example the font TAHOMA that I use for Arabic is defined for : ( this is from /use/X11/lib/X11/fonts/truetype/fonts.dir ) tahoma.ttf -microsoft-Tahoma-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-ascii-0 tahoma.ttf -microsoft-Tahoma-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-fcd8859-15 tahoma.ttf -microsoft-Tahoma-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-15 tahoma.ttf -microsoft-Tahoma-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-10 tahoma.ttf -microsoft-Tahoma-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-9 tahoma.ttf -microsoft-Tahoma-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-8 tahoma.ttf -microsoft-Tahoma-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-7 tahoma.ttf -microsoft-Tahoma-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-6 tahoma.ttf -microsoft-Tahoma-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-5 tahoma.ttf -microsoft-Tahoma-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-4 tahoma.ttf -microsoft-Tahoma-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-3 tahoma.ttf -microsoft-Tahoma-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-2 tahoma.ttf -microsoft-Tahoma-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1

while I want it to be defined for ISO10646-1 as well .. how can I do so ?

I guess you used ttmkfdir > fonts.scale.myfonts or something like that and then called SuSEconfig --module fonts The problem is only that ttmkfdir in SuSE 7.3 doesn't add lines with iso10646-1 encoding. Just add lines like tahoma.ttf -microsoft-Tahoma-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso10646-1 manually to the font.scale.myfonts and call SuSEconfig again. ttmkfdir in SuSE Linux > 7.3 is patched to add lines with iso10646-1 as well, i.e. If you had tried this on SuSE Linux > 7.3, it would already have worked by default. ttmkfdir has many problems though. For some fonts it doesn't generate lines which would work well with these fonts, for other fonts it omits useful lines. SuSE Linux >= 8.1 contains Juliusz Chroboczek's 'mkfontscale' which works better than ttmkfdir. But even 'mkfontscale' is not perfect. According to Juliusz, mapping TrueType and Type 1 font tables to XLFDs is intrinsically an underspecified task, i.e. hand editing the fonts.scale files is sometimes necessary for best results. All font packages distributed with SuSE Linux come with fonts.scale.something files which should work well. If you add other fonts you need to create your own fonts.scale.myfonts and may need to edit that if the output of ttmkfdir or mkfontscale isn't already perfect. -- Mike Fabian <mfabian@suse.de> http://www.suse.de/~mfabian 睡眠不足はいい仕事の敵だ。