font encodings

Forum: X and Fluxbox
Topic: font encodings
started by: mikshaw

Posted by mikshaw on Feb. 17 2006,19:37

I've been collecting some bitmap fonts for use in DSL, but it seems I don't have any idea whether or not all of the files are needed. For example, the LFP package has 1.8mb of fonts, but when i remove all but just one encoding type it's down to only 300k, and i still have use of all of the fonts. The thing i'm concerned about is this: Will removing all of these others prevent the fonts from being used by some people, or does DSL not use the additional encodings?

Started with this:

antique-10-m-r.pcf.gz
antique-10-m-r-ISO8859-5.pcf.gz
antique-10-m-r-ISO8859-1.pcf.gz
antique-10-m-r-ISO8859-15.pcf.gz
antique-10-m-r-KOI8-R.pcf.gz

I kept just antique-10-m-r.pcf.gz, which turned out to be iso10646-1

With the terminus font, the ones i kept are iso8859-1.

It doesn't seem like the extra encodings serve any purpose or make any difference, at least in DSL. Am I wrong?

Posted by mikshaw on Feb. 18 2006,01:57

It's really hard to find things on Gooooogle sometimes...most hits are font downloads.

From what I've gathered, it seems like iso8859-1 and iso10646-1 are very common, so unless anyone knows more I think i'll go with what I have.

Posted by IzzySmith on Feb. 22 2006,23:04

To tell you the truth, I've been racking my brain for a few days now, trying to figure out out how to add fonts of any kind to D.S.L. so that they'll come up in Firefox/GIMP/etc. .. so far no luck. TrueType or othewise.

I've been running the mk[font whatever]'s on another system of mine where I've just got a debian installation and then copying the directory struture over. Then adding the appropriate line in XF86Config-4 (not using Xvesa here)

Driving me nuts... :angry:

Posted by hs7sv on Feb. 23 2006,06:02

IzzySmith, you can download dsl-artwiz.tar.gz from DSL Download/System and use it as a template. It can be used for bitmap fonts. Bitmap fonts should work in Firefox but you need to add font part in the system.

Code Sample

xset +fp /Your FontPart

For TrueType Fonts, please read < this >.

Posted by mikshaw on Feb. 23 2006,15:48

hs7sv:
I'm going to repackage the artwiz extension, probably later today or tomorrow. I didn't have the forethought to realize that font packages installed as loose files in /opt/fonts would overwrite any existing fonts.dir and fonts.alias files in that directory. So the next version will be installed in /opt/fonts/artwiz to prevent this problem.

This isn't really related to the issue at hand, but thought i'd mention it.

Posted by hs7sv on Feb. 24 2006,09:47

mikshaw: thanks for your update.

Posted by mikshaw on Feb. 24 2006,14:47

How bizarre....it seems the package is already using a subdirectory, so there's no need to repackage. I guess i must have been using a test package on my system all this time....