GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 84912
Update freefonts/sharefonts instructions for xfs
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
The freefonts/sharefonts packages are great, but the README files are old and don't apply to modern systems that run the font server, xfs. Could the "Installation for X11" sections of the README files be updated? I'd suggest replacing step 3 with something like this: 3. Give the following commands to make X11 accept the new fonts: 3a. Older systems which do not use xfs: xset fp+ /usr/X11/lib/fonts/freefont xset fp rehash 3b. Systems using xfs (font path is something like unix/:7100): /etc/init.d/xfs stop touch fonts.dir in the directory where you extracted the new fonts /etc/init.d/xfs start Also: the README says to untar the archive in /usr/X11/lib/fonts. Redhat systems, at least, don't have a directory /usr/X11. They do have /usr/X11R6 (but there's no fonts subdir there), and there's /usr/lib/X11/fonts, but I usually add new fonts in /usr/share/fonts (which is normally already there). Might that be a better place for the README to tell people to extract the freefonts and sharefonts? (Modify my suggested 3b touch command accordingly, to point to wherever the README recommends that the fonts be extracted.)
Whoops! I forgot an important step, adding the new directories to the font path. Here's how my suggested revised instructions should look: modify as appropriate if you prefer to recommend a directory other than /usr/share/fonts. I think this is fairly general and should cover most distros Installation for X11 -------------------- 1. Change directory to /usr/share/fonts (or any existing font directory, such as /usr/lib/X11/fonts). 2. tar xzvf /path/to/freefont-0.10.tar.gz 3. Make X accept the new fonts: 3a. On older systems which do not use xfs: xset fp+ /usr/X11/lib/fonts/freefont xset fp rehash 3b. On newer systems using xfs (font path is something like unix/:7100): /etc/init.d/xfs stop touch /usr/share/fonts/freefont/fonts.dir chkfontpath --add /usr/share/fonts/freefont (systems without chkfontpath, add the path manually to the "catalogue" list in /etc/X11/fs/config) /etc/init.d/xfs start 4. The fonts are now available under X11. Check them out by running a program like "gfontsel" or "xfontsel". 5. Cleanup ... (as before)
Do we really want to touch these archives? I'd rather see them vanish. The quality of fonts is miserable, the copyright is unclear. The only point that speaks for keeping the freefonts package around is that we use the fonts as default values for our scripts. Perhaps we should change these defaults and finally bury these font packages.
Changes at the request of Dave Neary on the developer mailing list. I am changing many of the bugzilla reports that have not specified a target milestone to Future milestone. Hope that is acceptable.
The new web site does not provide a section about how to install fonts. It may be added later, but it is likely to be different from what we have in the old site. I don't think that we should update this seldom-used part of the old site if it is going to be replaced by the end of this month.
Changing all www.gimp.org bugs from gimp product to the gimp-web product, including old closed/fixed bugs, and reassigning.
re-resolving old bugs
Ooops - missed a few old resolved bugs
And missed the assignee.
Am I finally rid of these bugs?