[plug] Finding a font

[Cameron Patrick]

Harry wrote:

| and it works for me(tm) on mozilla and galeon under woody on
| my office machine. That is, there's arabic chars I can't read
| but it looks the business.

Likewise under sid for me at home.

| I can't figure out which font to install to make it work on a lighter
| woody (aka Computer Angels) installation.

$ apt-cache search arabic fonts
[...]
xfonts-intl-arabic - International fonts for X -- Arabic

I've no idea if these will help, but they sound vaguely appropriate.

| I've stared at .css files on the bbc site as well, trying
| to identify

"Urdu Naskh Asiatype"?  Doesn't ring any bells with me either.  Mozilla
will, however, substitute whatever fonts it can find that have the
required characters, so that's probably not a major issue.

Installing the Microsoft TrueType core fonts (free download) may also be
an idea.  They include a lot of strange characters from for'n parts.
For example, if I do "insert character" in Openoffice, and choose Times
New Roman, I can see a whole heap of funny looking squiggles in the
section "Basic Arabic" and "Arabic Extended".  Maybe they're what's
making things work on your machine?  The msttcorefonts package in Debian
will attempt to do this for you; alternatively head over to
http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/ and do it "the hard way".  Or if you
have a Windows machine kicking around just copy the TTF files over -
just sticking a copy into /usr/share/fonts/truetype suffices on my sid
machine, but that's with fontconfig niftiness that probably predates
woody.

... So ... it may be the case that further jumping through hoops may be
required to get TrueType and Unicode fonts working (and looking nice)
under woody.  In which case I'm afraid I can't really help.

Cameron.