Eureka!

[kerravonsen]

I have found it, I have found it!
And it took a lot of looking, I can tell you.

I have found the reason why the fonts stopped working in my mozilla.

Here it was, a new fancy mozilla, which decreed that TrueType fonts worked better now, and all that I found was that they didn't work at all! Well, they did work, but it looked as if it wasn't finding my huge directory full of TrueType fonts (fonts which I have collected over the years).

It worked fine before, because it was using the X-Windows font system. And I had figured out how to configure that to find my TrueType fonts years ago.
Now, plainly, with this new font stuff, it was using a different system, but what system it was, I knew not.
So I tried looking up stuff on the web, and what I found said "change this preference in your user.js file" so I did, and that didn't make any difference: it still didn't find the fonts.

So I gave up for a while, and resigned myself to less fonts.

Then, tonight, after installing mozilla 1.6, I thought I'd give it a go again. Maybe if I altered the global preferences it would work. So I tracked down where the global preference file was, and there was a comment, right next to the same preferences I'd been told to alter before: "I don't recommend enabling ft2 support. use mozilla-xft instead."

Hmmmm. So what was mozilla-xft? Well, it was a package. So I looked at the package description. That didn't say much except that it was enabling FreeType TrueType font support, which I knew already. What I didn't know was how. Then I looked at the list of files in the package. Maybe there was a README somewhere which would explain how to add a font-directory to the configuration. No README file.

So it was back to the net. Search for "mozilla-xft". On the second or third page, I eventually found a mail archive post that mentioned that mozilla-xft depended on fontconfig for finding its fonts. Hmmm. Wait a minute, fontconfig is another package. Maybe I'll have better luck looking for documentation associated with that package.

And I did.

It seems that the fontconfig package is a package for applications to use to find fonts (while bypassing things like the X-Windows font system) and that the configuration file is in /etc/fonts/fonts.conf and on Debian, said file has a comment in it right at the start saying that one should not edit this file, but should edit /etc/fonts/local.conf instead.

So I did.

And now all my lovely TrueType fonts are known about by mozilla.

Finally.

Have I ever remarked that I hate the font setup on Linux?

There's one set of font-configuration for X-Windows; one sets the font directories in either the X-Windows config file or in the X-Font-Server config file. One can also use the xset command on the fly.

There's another font-configuration for Ghostscript; one sets the GS_FONTPATH environment variable to tell it about new font directories.

Then we have the above fontconfig which mozilla uses.

Then it seems like every other application under the sun that uses fonts, has its own method of font configuration -- at least AbiWord and OpenOffice appear to ignore everyone else's font settings.

Then we have the nightmare of nightmares, TeX. With TeX, you can't just tell it what directories to look in. Oh no. Because it requires about five extra files per font, not just the .pfb (Type1) or .ttf (TrueType) font files that everything else accepts. And they all have to be installed in its directory hierarchy; you can't just tell it "look here for the TrueType fonts". I have eventually figured out that the simplest method of adding fonts to TeX is to use the option where it looks in the "texmf" directory in the user's home directory -- that means I only have to install them once -- because every time I got an upgrade of TeX, I'd have to re-configure the fonts again so it knew where to look, since the old config file got overridden.

Actually, I believe the "fontconfig" package is someone's attempt to have a common font system for Linux, but it's like the Uniting Church -- all they've managed to do is create another denomination.

Comments

[mistraltoes.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm glad you got them working. I had some trouble adding fonts to this Windows box as well, but nothing like that. Mind you, that sort of thing is part of the reason why the Red Hat 9 distribution is still sitting on my living room floor after six months, instead of being installed. [g]

fonts

[(Anonymous)]

hello..congrats...i've never bothered figuring out fonts on Linux...one of these days maybe. a new thing for me to waste time on :-)