Yet another font installation problem......

carlos123

I am so frustrated with Linux right now. I have just spent several hours trying and trying to figure out how to install new fonts for use by GNOME and just don't get it. As usual under Linux there are files and symbolic links everywhere and this or that service doing this or that to this or that which will be used by something like GNOME. Sometimes as now, things seem so incredibly ridiculous with Linux....it's like one big bowl of spaghetti and I feel like someone having to unravel the noodles one at a time.

I've had more problems trying to figure out where things are it under the hood so to speak than anything else. Googling has not helped hardly at all.

So....if someone would be so kind as to help me out of my present predicament I would surely appreciate it.

Specifically I have downloaded the Microsoft TT Fonts. They have been downloaded as a .gz or some other type of zip file. I can unzip them through Nautilus by clicking on them (good, good, nice easy thing to do

).

So I have gksu'ed into two nautilus windows (since the font:/// directory files are owned by root and since I want to copy things into that directory) and am grabbing the unzipped font files and dragging them into the window showing the fonts:/// directory (which I assume to be /usr/share/fonts). Absolutely not one thing gets copied over. All that happens is that when I release the mouse the little icon representing the font goes right back to the place where I dragged it from (namely the nautilus window showing the /tmp/ directory).

This whole thing has been an incredible exercise in futility so far.

Anyone got any suggestions? Other than just using emerge corefonts? I don't want to rely on emerge corefonts since 1) I am not sure what emerge corefonts does and 2) more importantly I want to learn to install fonts that I download from the Internet that do not have an ebuild for them. It should just be a matter of unzipping them and copying them to the fonts:/// directory (whereever that is). Shouldn't it?

Why can't I drag and drop through two Nautilus windows opened up as root (while running under a regular user under GNOME)?

I'll try copying through the CLI I guess but I am just wondering why trying what I am trying is not working through drag and drop in GNOME. When I go out to what I think is the underlying fonts:/// directory I see nothing like what I see through nautilus when traversing to fonts:/// so I am not even sure where to copy the fonts inside the .gz file???

Thanks.

Carlos

TheRAt · Veteran Joined: 03 Jun 2002 Posts: 1580

You could do the following..

Create a place to store your "downloaded" fonts (I use "/opt/fonts")

Just copy your downloaded fonts to /opt/fonts (uncompressed)..

Edit your /etc/X11/xorg.conf, and add the /opt/fonts dir in you fontpath

carlos123 · Posted: Tue Feb 22, 2005 12:42 pm Post subject:

Thanks for your as always good input TheRat.

I guess I will have to then go in and manually update yet another config file that is in yet another location (sigh

). And write yet one more tid bit of a note as to what I did where so that a when I install yet more fonts I'll be able to remember how I added them in the first place.

I take it then that GNOME's use of fonts is handled by the X server? Does that X server provide the fonts to GNOME? What is this that I read about something called the xft server or some such? Where does that come into play? Do all Linux distributions use the same font server?

gconf under GNOME is a great idea by the way. It's not totally implemented yet but at last somebody is getting the idea of creating a configuration facility that is abstracted from the file system such that users can go to ONE place and edit configuration options to their hearts content.

Anybody know why my drag and drop does not work through GNOME?

Carlos

transient · l33t Joined: 13 Jan 2005 Posts: 759

Fonts under linux can be rather confusing.... Ill try to explain how things work.

There are actually 3 forms of font rendering in X. There is the X server itself, there is the xft/freetype renderer, and there is application-specific renderers. Openoffice is an example of the last form, it renders all it's fonts itself.

Any fonts that X renders will generally be the ugly aliased kind, and most apps dont really use X's rendering anymore. Most use xft/freetype, which can render the nice pretty truetype/type1 fonts that you see on windows etc....
freetype still renders through X, but it doesnt call the X font rendering functions, rather it renders itself, and then just tells X to draw the specified shape.
The third type you wont need to worry about too much, there arent many apps that render their own fonts.

Where xfs (X Font Server) comes into this is that it simply takes the place of XFree86/Xorg's FontPath settings, and is of most use in a multiuser environment where many people might access the X server at once.

You also have fontconfig, which is a library that applications can use to find a particular font they want. Fontconfig builds a list of all fonts it can find from its config file, and it selects the most "matching" font to return. This means that if an app, say Mozilla, asks for the Arial font, but it isnt available on your system, fontconfig will look through its list of fonts and find one that is similar to Arial, and return that font instead.

In order to let new fonts actually be used, there are 3 requirements you need to do.
First, you need to update either the xfs config file, or the xorg.conf file's FontPath settings with the directories you have placed these files in. This is so anything that doesnt use fontconfig can find the fonts.
Secondly, you need to tell fontconfig about these new font directories. There are 2 ways to do this. The first is to edit the /etc/fonts/local.conf file and add in the new directories there. The format of that file is pretty simple, its just XML. You add a new directory by placing a

carlos123 · Posted: Tue Feb 22, 2005 1:55 pm Post subject:

Thanks transient. You have taken what is undoubtedly the most convulated, twisted, bizarre way of doing fonts one can imagine and explained it in a way that is somewhat understandable. It's a wonder anyone ever gets fonts right! Boy what an absolute mess of fontology Linux is.

I still don't know why stuff I have tried has either worked or not worked.

As a case in point I simply unzipped and untarred the TTF file into a directory that I found inside my home called ~/.fonts. How it got there I have no real clue. It didn't really have anything in it.

I did NOT add anything to any config file at all such as /etc/X11/xorg.conf, logged out and then back in again to restart X and lo and behold the fonts appear through GNOME! I can certainly remember how to do that in the future but as to why that worked at all? I have little of any clue. It's just one of those things I guess. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it don't.

I suppose GNOME itself bypasses X and somehow keeps track of fonts itself. Beats me.

Of course unless I put them where GNOME looks for fonts system wide none of these fonts will be available to other users unless I create a .font directory in each of their home directories.

I am definitely going to be studying what you said some more transient. What you described is quite a mess of sphagetti. It's going to take some time for me to make heads or tails of it.

Carlos

carlos123 · Posted: Wed Feb 23, 2005 11:59 pm Post subject:

Well...now that I have finished emerging Ximian Open Office and have gotten used to those nice looking Microsoft fonts again I find myself once again bumping up against these never ending font hassles in that I have no clue as to how to include the nice TTF into those that Open Office offers me. It's obviously not reading from where GNOME reads the fonts from.

I have the TTF inside ~/.fonts.

I can probably Google once again and spend another hour or two trying to figure my way around this latest of font headaches but would anyone be so kind as to point me in the right direction in terms of how to get Open Office to recognize the TTF fonts I've copied to ~/.fonts?

Thanks.

Carlos

TheRAt · Veteran Joined: 03 Jun 2002 Posts: 1580

Run the OpenOffice.org Printer Administration utility, and click on the Fonts... and click Add...

Fonts should be available to openoffice on the next restart of the application.
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transient · l33t Joined: 13 Jan 2005 Posts: 759

carlos123 · Posted: Thu Feb 24, 2005 2:17 am Post subject:

If you all are talking about spadmin I tried that already (/opt/Ximian-OpenOffice/spadmin). Practically clicking on every button in that utility and there is no Add Fonts button in it anywhere that will allow me to add fonts.

There is an Add Font button in relation to Font Replacement but that just allows me to indicate which fonts to replace with which other fonts in case Open Office does not have a font available. Even then it does not show any of my Microsoft TTF so as to let me replace any existing fonts with them. It does not allow me to add fonts to Open Office overall.

Not sure what you mean by OpenOffice.org Printer Administration utility if not spadmin.

Carlos

TheRAt · Veteran Joined: 03 Jun 2002 Posts: 1580

carlos123 · Posted: Thu Feb 24, 2005 3:17 am Post subject:

Nope. Not there.

Jengu · Guru Joined: 28 Oct 2004 Posts: 384

TheRAt · Veteran Joined: 03 Jun 2002 Posts: 1580

I have found a number of posts online, most over a year old, that state that they are unable to locate the spadmin utility, and don't know how to add fonts.. Not sure what is different in the ximian product.. Or what advantages there are.. I am using the OOo 1.1.4 package, and it seems to use the same fonts as are available to X, without me having to separately add fonts to the openoffice system.. Unfortunately, I did not find any answers to any of the posts I mentioned.. You might try the ximian (novell) site, and see if there is anything posted in the forums there.. and post your result here when you solve this...
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carlos123 · Posted: Thu Feb 24, 2005 3:46 am Post subject:

I'll definitely post the results when I solve this TheRAT. Novell's forums are a bit of a let down. They just aren't very active yet I guess that's understandable in view of how they recently bought out Suse and all. They probably won't have their act together for another 6 months to a year I am guessing. In terms of having some decent support forums and such available in more than just name.

The mailing lists having to do with Evolution are pretty sparse too (also a Novell product).

Anyway I'll keep at it until I solve this. Can't have my word processor that I plan to show off to potential clients running around with the usual poor quality Linux fonts that are available. Nothing in Linux beats Verdana, Trebuchet MS, Arial, and some of the other fonts from Microsoft though Bitstream Sans Sarif and some others come somewhat close. It's not so bad if the Linux fonts are all that one is accustomed to but having tried the Microsoft fonts in some other applications I now want them everywhere

.

Carlos

TheRAt · Veteran Joined: 03 Jun 2002 Posts: 1580

What are the advantages to using the ximian openoffice... rather than the OOo version??

I have had to deal with Novell software in a previous job, and they have generally been very good.. although you are probably correct in that it will take then a little while to get properly set up...
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carlos123 · Posted: Thu Feb 24, 2005 7:29 am Post subject:

Well I've only just installed it so I can't rightly say all that might be of benefit but I will say this...under GNOME it fits very nicely with the general theme of GNOME. Much nicer than OpenOffice.org fit running under KDE. And it seems to load a lot faster than OpenOffice.org ever did. And that's running off of a much slower hard drive than my old system is on! (I'll transfer my entire system over to the faster hard drive and trash my old Gentoo when I have everything just the way I want it).

Just as a side note ....

After having run under KDE for a year or two and having encountered all manner of quirky behaviour through it culminating in the trashing of hundreds of my emails through KMail I switched to GNOME. There is no way I would recommend KDE for a production business environment any more.

Ximian GNOME also looks a lot nicer from the default install than OpenOffice.org did too.

Those are just very preliminary first impressions and may not stand up once I get it going and use it for a while.

Carlos

TheRAt · Veteran Joined: 03 Jun 2002 Posts: 1580

Be interested in what you think of it after a bit of usage... I have always just used OOo for my tiny needs for an office package..
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carlos123 · Posted: Fri Feb 25, 2005 1:21 am Post subject:

Alrighty then. My fonts are now working perfectly under Ximian-OpenOffice.

Here is what I did in retrospect and to sum it up.

I uncompressed and copied the fonts I wanted to add to the ~/.font directory of the user I normally log in as. For me that would be /home/carlos/.fonts. ~ stands for my home directory which in my case is /home/carlos. (Sorry for the hand holding here but some might read this who are not Linux savvy).

Okay...

I found an excellent thread on fonts and Ximian-OpenOffice if you want to read more on this at http://lists.debian.org/debian-openoffice/2004/08/msg00015.html

Ximian-OpenOffice does NOT use the spadmin utility to change it's own fonts or the fonts available from within it. That utility is soley used to set up printers used by OpenOffice.org and Ximian-OpenOffice and to set up font replacements for printing purposes that might not be available under OO or XOO.

Here is a quote from the thread...

transient · l33t Joined: 13 Jan 2005 Posts: 759

Ximian OOffice uses fontconfig?
Well its about damn time.....
Fontconfig, if you recall from my above post, is a library used for selecting fonts. If openoffice uses it now, thats excellent, because it makes font configuring in openoffice much much easier.

carlos123 · Posted: Fri Feb 25, 2005 1:33 am Post subject:

Hoorah for Ximian-OpenOffice, OpenOffice.org, and open source under Linux!! Progress!!

By the way here is another excellent thread I found http://lists.ximian.com/archives/public/users/2004-February/013099.html It's a bit dated but very worthwhile to read though in terms of understanding some of the changes that are happening with font selection in OO and XOO.

Carlos

TheRAt · Veteran Joined: 03 Jun 2002 Posts: 1580

Thanks for the update Carlos... Would still be interested in the update, sometime in the future, of what you thought of the ximian package over your previous usage of the OOo package...

Might also be advisable to add this information in the Gentoo Wiki, maybe in the tips section...

Thanks.
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carlos123 · Posted: Fri Feb 25, 2005 5:04 am Post subject:

I will try to remember to give you an update in the future TheRAT but don't know if I will be able to remember to do that in view of everything else I got going on

. Feel free to drop me a line through PM 6 months from now if you don't hear from me and I will be more than glad to let you know by then.

I'll look at the Gentoo Wiki and see if I might not be able to contribute something there on this.

Carlos

transient · l33t Joined: 13 Jan 2005 Posts: 759

Theres a font-howto on the wiki, so you could look at adding to that perhaps.
Ive been thinking about adding to it, just to explain the difference between Xorg, fontconfig, xft, xfs and so on, as there seems to be a lot of confusion about the whole matter

carlos123 · Posted: Fri Feb 25, 2005 6:19 am Post subject:

transient · l33t Joined: 13 Jan 2005 Posts: 759

Its not so much that there are too many ways to do things, its just that there is really a big lack of documentation on the whole issue.
The Xorg server's renderer is really defunct now, and most apps now use XFT to do their rendering. However, you dont tend to find mention of this anywhere.
Similarly, most people have fontconfig installed, in fact almost everyone will as its really a neccesary component of a system. But again, not many people know what it actually does, or how to use it to make their system aware of new fonts that theyve installed.