Eric Pierce <eric_suse@yahoo.com> writes:
Can anyone give me some pointers on getting GIMP to handle TTFonts under SuSE 7.3?
There seems to nothing special to do, for TTFonts it just works. There are problems with Bitmap fonts and some Type1 fonts, but I never encountered problems with TrueType fonts in Gimp.
-- Mike Fabian <mfabian@suse.de>
Your (Mike Fabian's) site got me up to speed. www.suse.com/~mfabian/suse-cjk/installing-tt-fonts-X11.html
[...]
All the new TTFont names show up in GIMP. The TTFonts that work, work very well, but the majority of the fonts give me the following error when I try add text with the 'text' tool: Font '<font name>' not found.
I've been searching the net for some clues... but I have yet to stumble upon an answer.
First a description of the problem (Solution below): 1) Problems with scalable fonts: Although all TT fonts installed on my system worked for me, I heard problem reports from other people, therefore Holger Hetterich and me investigated the problem to day. It seems that a patch added by SuSEKorea which used gdk_fontset_load instead of gdk_font_load caused problems with some scalable fonts. All types of scalable fonts (TrueType, Type1, CID-keyed) seem to work fine without this patch, whereas there are problems with some fonts when this patch is applied. As far as I can see, this patch doesn't have *any* advantage, the selection in the text tool of Gimp returns a single font, not a font set, Korean fonts (and other Asian fonts) still work fine even without this patch. Therefore we removed this fontset patch. 2) Problems with Bitmap fonts: Almost all directories with Bitmap fonts currently have ":unscaled" added to the font path by default in SuSE Linux (See the font paths in /etc/X11/XF86config). The text tool of Gimp almost always tries to scale the fonts, even the bitmap fonts. When scaling of bitmap fonts is disabled because ":unscaled" has been added to a bitmap font directory, Gimp still requests a scaled bitmap font and fails. Removing the ":unscaled" would make it work for some bitmap fonts, but this is not a good solution. The ":unscaled" is there for a reason. For example, if scaling of bitmap fonts is allowed, the default setup of KDE becomes unbearably ugly on some display resolutions. And, even without ":unscaled", Gimp still fails to load many bitmap fonts, because Gimp often tries to request the fonts with a different resolution. For example, the GNU-Unicode bitmap font actually is available in the following size and resolution: -gnu-unifont-medium-r-normal--16-160-75-75-p-80-iso10646-1 After Removing the ":unscaled" from the /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/uni fontpath, the GNU-Unicode font is also available in the following pattern: -gnu-unifont-medium-r-normal--0-0-75-75-p-0-iso10646-1 The '0' can be replaced by any size and one will get a scaled bitmap font. I.e. the following font could be successfully requested: -gnu-unifont-medium-r-normal--21-0-75-75-p-0-iso10646-1 but scaling a 16 pixel bitmap font to 21 pixel gives a ugly result. Requesting a different resolution from '75' would not work, i.e. -gnu-unifont-medium-r-normal--21-0-72-72-p-0-iso10646-1 would not work. And Gimp tries to request a changed resolution for bitmap fonts most of the time, therefore bitmap fonts don't work most of the time. Holger and me fixed this by disabling scaling and antialiasing for bitmap fonts in Gimp completely. Scaling and antialiasing for bitmap fonts doesn't really make much sense anyway, if one wants to use scaling and antialiasing, one should use scalable fonts like TrueType, Type1 or CID-keyed fonts. Bitmap fonts look best in their original size. New gimp packages without the Korean fontset patch and with the patch disabling scaling and antialiasing for bitmap fonts are available here: ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/people/mfabian/7.3-i386/gimp-1.2.2-245.i386.rpm ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/people/mfabian/7.3-i386/gimp-1.2.2-245.src.rpm ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/people/mfabian/7.3-i386/gimp-devel-1.2.2-245.i386.rpm ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/people/mfabian/7.3-i386/gimphelp-1.2.2-245.i386.rpm Please test. We tested tons of scalable fonts and they all seem to work perfectly now. All bitmap fonts work as well, but as explained above they are used only in their native pixel size and not scaled. I believe it is better like that, scaled bitmap fonts are unbearably ugly and there are enough scalable fonts available to make scaled bitmap fonts superfluous. -- Mike Fabian <mfabian@suse.de> http://www.suse.de/~mfabian 睡眠不足はいい仕事の敵だ。