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Project: Linux  Articles
True Type fonts under Linux
By Mayank Sarup <mayank@freeos.com>
Posted: ( 2000-10-03 12:10:17 EST by )
Linux may boast of having several fantastic GUIs but the fact remains that
when you get online, you do have to strain to look at the text on the screen.
Linux font support has lagged behind in the past but not now. Here's how you
can use True Type fonts under Linux.
It's time to get on the Internet. You fire up Netscape, go to www.freeos.com
and look in horror at the horrible fonts in use. FreeOS obviously doesn't
know how to make a good page. You move off to your other favourite news
site and more horrendous fonts are waiting for you there too. Something
wrong? Not really. Just that X doesn't use the newer True Type fonts which
are now heavily used on the web and thanks to Microsoft, have become the
most popular font format. X still uses the older bitmap fonts which don't
scale well, hence the horrible fonts. Fortunately there is a way to utilise
True Type fonts on Linux too. Xfree86 4 and above include True Type font support so you don't have to do
anything else. If you're using a version below 4, you need to get a X true
type font server. I'm using xfsft which you can get here.
( http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/home/jec/programs/xfsft/ ). Currently it is the
best font server and was made part of the Xfree86 4 source tree. The latest version as of writing this article is 1.1.6. Red Hat, Mandrake and
users of distributions based on Red Hat do not need xfs as it is already
included in versions later than 6, though slighthly modified. You can safely
skip the next few steps. Untar the file somewhere. /tmp is a good location. tar zxvf xfsft-1.1.6.linux-i386-libc6.tar.gz
cd xfsft-1.1.6 Copy the xfs binary to some suitable location. If you have a xfs binary
lying somewhere then overwrite it with this one. I'm using SuSE and I
copied this one over the one on my hard drive. cp xfs /usr/X11R6/bin/xfs Untar the included encodings.tar file in some suitable location, usually
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts. cd /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts
tar xvf /encodings.tar Red Hat users can join me now. Create a new directory to hold your fonts. mkdir /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/ttf Where to get the fonts from? 1. There are plenty of free fonts on the Internet that you can
download. Start with www.freefonts.com. 2. If you have a windows partition on your computer then you can use the
fonts directly from the windowsfonts directory. Just mount the windows
partition and add the font's directory to the FontPath in your xfs
config or in you XF86config file. More on this later. You need to create a fonts.dir file that lists the fonts in your
directory. You will need the ttmkdir utility which you can get here
( http://www.darmstadt.gmd.de/~pommnitz/TrueType/ttmkfdir.tar.gz ). Red
Hat 6 and above already include this utility. Untar the tar.gz tar zxvf ttmkfdir.tar.gz
cd ttmkfdir
cp ttmkfdir.linuxbin.glibc2 /usr/bin/ttmkfdir Go to the directory where you placed the fonts. cd /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/ttf Run ttkmkfdir with the following command. ttmkfdir -o fonts.dir In Red Hat you can give the following command to add the True Type fonts
directory to your list of font paths and restart the X font server. chkfontpath --add /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/ttf /etc/rc.d/init.d/xfs restart That is all you need to do to get True Type fonts into Red Hat and Red
Hat'ish distributions. Other distributions require a little more work before they can start using
True Type fonts. Create a new file /etc/xfstf.conf with the following contents client-limit = 10
clone-self = off
use-syslog = off
error-file = /var/log/xfs.errors # in decipoints
default-point-size = 120 # x,y
default-resolutions = 100,100,75,75 catalogue = /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/ttf,
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/morettf,
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/evenmorettf The great thing about this font server is that it can serve fonts to
remote clients too. Set up this font server on your network and you can
serve fonts to everyone on it. Way better than individually configuring
each computer. Red Hat, with an eye on security, has modified the font server so that it
will serve fonts only to the local computer. You will need to make a few
changes to allow xfs to serve fonts remotely. Edit /etc/rc.d/init.d/xfs Look for a line that says "daemon xfs -droppriv -daemon -port -1". Remove
the -droppriv part and the -port part. Restart the font server and you're
ready to serve fonts remotely. Let's move on to the various configuration options given here. Red Hat's
xfs configuration file is /etc/X11/fs/config. Syntax is the same. client-limit = x
The number of clients that the font server should serve fonts to. clone-self = off
If the font server reached it's client limit then should it create a clone
to serve more clients. Use 'on' here if you want his behaviour. use-syslog = off
Whether the font server should send messages and errors to syslog. Better
option is to dump all that in a seperate file using the option below. error-file = /foo/blah/xfs.errors
The file to which warning and errors will be dumped. default-point-size = 120
The default point size in decipoints for fonts where this is not
specified. default-resolutions = 100,100,75,75
Default resolutions supported by the font server in pixels per
inch. Multiple resolutions are seperated by commas. catalogue = /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/ttf
A list of the directories where fonts can be found. Seperate with commas
but no comma after the last entry. Start xfs with xfs -config /etc/xfsft.conf & Now you need to tell your X server the location of the True Type fonts. Make
the following entry in all the client machines that will be using the font
server. The file to edit is XF86config. This will be found under
/etc/XF86config for SuSE or under /etc/X11/XF86config for Red Hat users. Find
the FontPath entries in the configuration file and add another line there. FontPath "tcp/foobar:7100" Replace foobar with the name of your server or the IP address of the
server. Or enter localhost if the fontserver is running locally. Red Hat
users will need to replace the entry unix/:-1 with the above. One thing you will have to be careful about. If the font server goes down
on the server then X will refuse to start because it is not able to find
the True Type fonts. Comment out the entry and X will work fine. Start your browser and check out a cleaner web. If all goes well then just
add the next entry to your startup scripts or to the server's startup
scripts depending on where you're running the font server. /usr/X11R6/bin/xfs -config /etc/xfstf.conf & That's all you need to do to use True Type fonts under Linux. But it's not
all good news. Fonts under Linux do not look as good as under Windows. Windows
also uses a technique called anti-aliasing which greatly improves the overall
appearance of fonts, especially at larger font sizes. Support for that is in
the making and the result is said to be even better than Windows. Check
out www.freetype.org for more on this.
Other articles by Mayank Sarup
Current Rating: [ 7.21 / 10 ]
Number of Times Rated: [ 43 ]
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