Re: fonts in Cygwin

[Klaus Kassner <Klaus dot Kassner at physik dot uni-magdeburg dot de>]

Michael Denk wrote (schrieb, a écrit):
> On Mon, 1 Aug 2005, Klaus Kassner wrote:

>  Actually I got Helvetica Narrow working. I don't know how Debian handles

Well, I did not, so far :-(.  I have not done everything *exactly* as 
you describe, because that was not possible, but I think I was close 
enough that it should have worked, unless I overlooked something important.

> XXX.alias files as normally only files named fonts.alias are recognized as
> aliases. I appended the content from this file to fonts.alias, did some

I just copied gsfonts-x11.alias to fonts.alias, because there was no 
previous fonts.alias in Type1.

> renaming (e.g. medium vs. regular), copied the fonts from the ghostscript
> fonts dir to the Type1 fonts dir and called font-update to rebuild
> fonts.dir, fonts.scale and the font cache. 

I did that, too, except for the renaming, since I did not know which 
fonts to rename to what.  Incidentally, there is no man page of 
font-update and "font-update -h" does not give any information either. 
Is it usable only to rebuild fonts.dir and the other stuff in 
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts?

I had to remove some of the copied fonts, because font-update did not 
find font sizes and font weights for them.  These were all the fonts 
starting with "hr".  But then font-update worked through the directory 
without error message, and I restarted the X server.  After calling 
xfig, I had to notice that now xfig did not even find the Times Roman 
fonts, not to speak of Helvetica Narrow...

Fortunately (or rather, cautiously), I had made a backup of the Type1 
directory and after removing the "spoilt" one and replacing it by the 
backup, everything worked as before - that is, most fonts were present, 
but Helvetica Narrow was not.  (But when starting xfig, I always get a 
warning: startup scroll not found, which I don't really understand and 
which does not seem to affect its functioning.)

> After restarting the X server
> this worked for some fonts in Xfig or xfontsel, others crashed the
> applications.
>  I found some information on the internet that Debian users who have
> installed gsfonts-x11 experienced similar behavior to some extent. I wrote
> some nifty installation script that does all the work in setting up the
> mappings to the ghostscript fonts but as long as I don't know why some
> fonts cause these crashes I prefer not to publish it. This could take a
> while.

My question is then: did you use the ghostscript fonts from your cygwin 
installation (this is what I did) or those from some other Linux/Unix 
system?

What I'll probably try next is to get only Helvetica-Narrow running, 
i.e. copy only those few fonts, because they are actually the only ones 
I need in addition to those working already.  But I do not understand 
why the system lost the Times Roman fonts.  How does the fonts.alias 
mechanism work?  I read that you can have one fonts.alias for several 
directories.  But there was one in almost every font directory under 
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts.  And the Times fonts are not in Type1, 
apparently, so I don't understand how changing directory Type1 and none 
of the others can render them invisible...


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