Isam Bayazidi
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