13. X Font Tools

X supports fonts in a number of forms, including its own "bitmap" format, "Speedo," Adobe's "Type 1," Apple's "True Type."

• The FREETYPE Project

• FontForge

  A Postscript font editor that allows transforming a number of font formats to and from the Postcript PFA form.

• Xfstt - X Font Server for the Apple TrueType format

• xfsft: Truetype Font Support For X

• Instructions on how to use Xfstt

  • cd over to /usr and create a link for Xfstt to find the fonts:

    ln -s /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/ttfonts ttfonts

    Xfstt looks for fonts in /usr/ttfonts but I like to keep my font directories grouped together under /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/

  • Build and install Xfstt

    I untarred Xfstt under /tmp but it doesn't matter where it's done. When you run make install, one of the things it does is run

    xfstt --sync

    xfstt --sync generates two files in the truetype font directory:

    • ttinfo.dir

    • ttname.dir

  • I made a copy of ttname.dir and called it fonts.scale.

    fonts.scale is one continous line of descriptions of all the fonts in the directory. I edit my new fonts.scale file placing each font description on it's own line. The font descriptions need to be edited.

    As an example, change a description like :

    Nimrod Bold nimb____ttf -ttf-nimrod-bold-r-normal-tt

    to

    Nimrod Bold nimb____ttf -ttf-nimrod-bold-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1

    Count the total number of font descriptions and enter that number on the first line of the file (by itself). You can make a copy of this file calling it fonts.dir or you can run the program mkfontdir.

  • Edit the file (if you are using XFree86) called XF86Config in /etc/X11/ and change the line after fontpath to something like:

    "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/:unscaled,/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/:unscaled, inet/127.0.0.1:7100,/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/,usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/">

  • Before running startx start up xfstt. I found that the fonts in Java's SwingSet example look the right size if I start xfstt as follows:

    xfstt --res 72 &

  • The easiest way to make these fonts available to ghostscript is to set the environment variable GS_FONTPATH in .bashrc to /usr/share/ghostscript/fonts,/usr/X11R6/X11/fonts/ttfonts

    Ghostscript will run faster if you edit its Fontmap file but I haven't noticed any undesirable delays.

  As a test, I used a font in Applix's editor that was only available as a truetype font and sent it out to the printer.

  -- <bkchamb@ibm.net>Brian Chamberlain

• Brian Miller's X Fonts Fixit Page

• TrueType HOWTO

• XFree86 Font Deuglification HOW-TO

• T1lib

  T1lib can be used to add fully scalable Type 1 fonts with kerning, ligatures, antialiasing and other features not usually found in X applications. Existing fonts can be leveraged and new ones easily installed without modifying X or installing "font servers">.

  Note that T1lib was once part of the SciTeXt "scientific wordprocessor" package. When development efforts moved to Java, the code for this was split off. The SciTeXt project seems not to have proceeded very far from there; it is fortunate that this library allows there to be some continuing value from the efforts. This is one of the valuable features of free software.

• HFM - Hamster Font Manager

  Manages font configuration for X, TeX, and Ghostscript.

• Ligature Schmigature

  Web page describing the problems with ligature handling, basically suggesting that they shouldn't be bothered with anymore, at least not for display purposes...