[plug] Finding a font

[Harry]

On Tue, 17 Feb 2004 00:05:33 +0800 Cameron Patrick <cameron at patrick.wattle.id.au> wrote:

> 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.

Ok. I up-ed a machine to sid and haven't made it word despite:
apt_get install xfonts-*
so you later suggestions may offer the answer
 
> | 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

No luck. I assumed this would fix it too.

> 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.

Yes. I have loaded those on my maxhine. I stopped xfs and xfstt but the
fonts still displayed so they will work simply with an entry
	FontType	"/usr/lib/X11/fonts/TrueType"
in XF86Config-4

No wait. I forgot to explain that I commented away all FontPath lines
except
	FontType	"/usr/lib/X11/fonts/misc"
and spent some time flinging out fonts and running mkfontdir and
restarting. I have a lot of fonts in there so progress was glacial.

Is this the only source of fonts or can X, mozilla, and/or galeon
fetch fonts from elsewhere ? 

I found some arabic chars by browsing through xfontsel but I was
losing the plot and resorted to moaning on the list :-)

I wondered if there was a magical BetterWay.

> 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".

Do you think I've discounted this by only having the misc font directory ?

> 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.

It goes on woody (mine) just not on another woody do there must be a
solution (or I'm mistaking myself for a teapot).

> ... 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.

It's been a big help Cameron, thanks. Unless fonts are obtained in another
way, the solution must lie in the misc font directory (xfs and xfstt were
stopped during all of this).

If fonts can be found another way that someone is aware of this will
mean I don't have to plod through the misc directory. Otherwise plod,
plod .. 

All the best
Harry

-- 
Are you a computer angel?	http://www.computerangels.org.au/