[SOLVED] Having difficulty installing (and understanding) fonts

Shadow_7 · 04-08-2017, 06:55 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gregg Bell

Thanks Shadow. That's good to know. So the idea is any time a font changes in $HOME/.fonts/ run those commands?

It wouldn't hurt to run them all every time you start X, after X has started. But you only need to run the mkfont* ones when the contents of .fonts/ changes. Add, Modify, Delete. There's a way to make the other xset and fc-cache ones more permanent, but I gave up on trying to find that guide again a while ago. It was such a nice guide too.

mrmazda · 04-08-2017, 07:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gregg Bell

To copy (see 224) do I just go with the defaults checked?

It's what I do.

Quote:

I was concerned about 'with source mask' and 'using shell patterns.'

mc has a mailing list if you want details, but those are basically it's intelligence at work available for editing for those who'd for whatever reason rather do something they are privy to differently.

Quote:

(MC would really be helpful on a regular basis if I could trust it.)

I trust it more than any GUI file manager. I don't use any GUI file manager in Linux. I use either MC or FC/L or the cmdline for all file management chores in Linux.

Quote:

And #6 in the MC function keys is basically the same as "cut"?

F6 Ren(ame/)Mov(e) depends on context. Sometimes it's cut, sometimes nothing but a name change.

Quote:

And I was reading about MC and it said if copying directories the changes would be applied 'recursively.' I Googled and looked around but I still don't really know what recursively means.

It means copy everything hiding underneath what you've selected as well as the selection(s), whole trees when the selection includes directories. Without recursion the result would be newly created empty directories.

Quote:

And I plopped a couple of fonts (via MC) into /usr/local/share/fonts and unfortunately they do not show up in Pixeluvo.

From what source did you get Monteserrat? I looked and found multiple sources. Maybe your solution is getting it elsewhere?

If you try to use Monteserrat in other apps besides Pixeluvo and L.O. is it found? Does fc-match find it?

It sounds like one or more of a few things may be involved. IIRC, *buntu by default installs so many fonts that there isn't anyone on the planet whose native language would not be fully covered by those it installs by default. I don't let that happen on mine (I install minimal, then add what I know I need), but it could be that adding more overloads the system's ability to wade through and resolve brokenness and/or duplication. It could be Monteserrat is a broken font. If you can't get Monteserrat recognized by Pixeluvo even after trying to install it in every legal location, and running 'fc-cache -r' after each try, I'd bring it up directly with Pixeluvo support.

Quote:

I remembered that when I put the font LinuxLibertine (there are about seven of them) into LibreOffice via Synaptic Package Manager the LinuxLibertine fonts also showed up in Pixeluvo. So I Catfish file searched and found LinuxLibertine in /usr/share/doc and /usr/share bug. I took screenshots of the doc one because I figured it wouldn't be the bug one. (see 229 & 230). As you can see I didn't find the actual font ttf files.

Maybe you would find them looking with mc? Finding them is no problem here:

Code:

$ ll /usr/share/fonts/truetype/LinL*f
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 383672 Sep 11  2015 /usr/share/fonts/truetype/LinLibertine_DR.otf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 399004 Sep 11  2015 /usr/share/fonts/truetype/LinLibertine_I.otf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 139864 Sep 11  2015 /usr/share/fonts/truetype/LinLibertine_M.otf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 363740 Sep 11  2015 /usr/share/fonts/truetype/LinLibertine_RBI.otf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 426060 Sep 11  2015 /usr/share/fonts/truetype/LinLibertine_RB.otf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 445044 Sep 11  2015 /usr/share/fonts/truetype/LinLibertine_RI.otf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 528064 Sep 11  2015 /usr/share/fonts/truetype/LinLibertine_R.otf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 397388 Sep 11  2015 /usr/share/fonts/truetype/LinLibertine_RZI.otf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 350264 Sep 11  2015 /usr/share/fonts/truetype/LinLibertine_RZ.otf

I think for the case of Pixeluvo, because of its apparent youthful age, you are wasting time and effort trying to use the long ago deprecated /home/gregory/.fonts/ location. If your package manager cannot install Monteserrat successfully, you should limit your tries to /usr/local/share/fonts/ and/or /home/gregory/.local/share/fonts/.

Gregg Bell · 04-09-2017, 05:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Emerson

Code:

sudo fc-cache -fv ~/.fonts

This is a command I'd never run. Running as root in your home directory is calling for trouble, all files created/modified will be owned by root, this can cause weirdest errors when user started applications cannot write and modify these files.

Well, as you can see I've already run it. Is there any reversing it somehow? Any lessening the potential problems? And if not, what sort of weird errors should I be expecting? Thanks.

Emerson · 04-09-2017, 05:48 PM

Yes, you can run chown recursively on ~/.fonts to make you the owner again.

Gregg Bell · 04-09-2017, 07:05 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Emerson

Yes, you can run chown recursively on ~/.fonts to make you the owner again.

Cool, Emerson, thanks. But can you give me the exact command to run? Appreciate it. (I'm a writer and the idea of fonts being screwed up terrifies me!)

Gregg Bell · 04-09-2017, 07:40 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mrmazda

It's what I do.

mc has a mailing list if you want details, but those are basically it's intelligence at work available for editing for those who'd for whatever reason rather do something they are privy to differently.

I trust it more than any GUI file manager. I don't use any GUI file manager in Linux. I use either MC or FC/L or the cmdline for all file management chores in Linux.

F6 Ren(ame/)Mov(e) depends on context. Sometimes it's cut, sometimes nothing but a name change.

It means copy everything hiding underneath what you've selected as well as the selection(s), whole trees when the selection includes directories. Without recursion the result would be newly created empty directories.

From what source did you get Monteserrat? I looked and found multiple sources. Maybe your solution is getting it elsewhere?

If you try to use Monteserrat in other apps besides Pixeluvo and L.O. is it found? Does fc-match find it?

It sounds like one or more of a few things may be involved. IIRC, *buntu by default installs so many fonts that there isn't anyone on the planet whose native language would not be fully covered by those it installs by default. I don't let that happen on mine (I install minimal, then add what I know I need), but it could be that adding more overloads the system's ability to wade through and resolve brokenness and/or duplication. It could be Monteserrat is a broken font. If you can't get Monteserrat recognized by Pixeluvo even after trying to install it in every legal location, and running 'fc-cache -r' after each try, I'd bring it up directly with Pixeluvo support.

Maybe you would find them looking with mc? Finding them is no problem here:

Code:

$ ll /usr/share/fonts/truetype/LinL*f
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 383672 Sep 11  2015 /usr/share/fonts/truetype/LinLibertine_DR.otf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 399004 Sep 11  2015 /usr/share/fonts/truetype/LinLibertine_I.otf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 139864 Sep 11  2015 /usr/share/fonts/truetype/LinLibertine_M.otf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 363740 Sep 11  2015 /usr/share/fonts/truetype/LinLibertine_RBI.otf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 426060 Sep 11  2015 /usr/share/fonts/truetype/LinLibertine_RB.otf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 445044 Sep 11  2015 /usr/share/fonts/truetype/LinLibertine_RI.otf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 528064 Sep 11  2015 /usr/share/fonts/truetype/LinLibertine_R.otf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 397388 Sep 11  2015 /usr/share/fonts/truetype/LinLibertine_RZI.otf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 350264 Sep 11  2015 /usr/share/fonts/truetype/LinLibertine_RZ.otf

I think for the case of Pixeluvo, because of its apparent youthful age, you are wasting time and effort trying to use the long ago deprecated /home/gregory/.fonts/ location. If your package manager cannot install Monteserrat successfully, you should limit your tries to /usr/local/share/fonts/ and/or /home/gregory/.local/share/fonts/.

Thanks mrmazda. Great explanations.

Okay, I got the Montserrat from a font site on the web. It works properly. I may have mispoken though about Pixeluvo and the Montserrat font. The Montserrat font is in Pixeluvo and functional. However it is there all by itself, whereas there are several versions of Montserrat (and several versions for Roboto, for that matter) that should be there. (And yes, they are all on GIMP.) I emailed the developer and asked this:

Quote:

Question though: I downloaded some fonts to the .fonts folder (I'm running Xubuntu.) So say it was: Roboto Regular, Roboto Condensed, Roboto Italics. Well, when I open up Pixeluvo only:

Roboto

is there.

(No indication of which Roboto.)

He responded:

Quote:

Hi Gregg, I rely on Qt for finding all the available fonts, and its behaviour seems to be that it groups regular, bold and italic styles into one family. Testing here (on Windows) Roboto Regular and Roboto Italics are listed just as Roboto, and you can set the style to italic to use the italic version. Roboto Condensed appears as a separate font family for me (same with Roboto Light etc). I'll try and fire up an instance of Xubuntu and see what's going on there if you're not seeing that - I'm not sure where those other styles are ending up at the moment.

I was unable to find the LinuxLibertine via MC. The screenshot is as close as I got. Thanks.

mrmazda · 04-09-2017, 07:53 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gregg Bell

I was unable to find the LinuxLibertine via MC. The screenshot is as close as I got.

I think your continued frustration with the subject is holding you back. Not all ?tf fonts are under truetype. Look a little harder.

A precise answer to your question of Emerson requires more information than you've provided in thread.

Code:

chown -R gregory:<gregory'shomegroup> ~/.fonts

is about as close as anyone can get.

mrmazda · 04-09-2017, 08:17 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gregg Bell

Okay, I got the Montserrat from a font site on the web.

I searched and found several possibilities before I asked. That's why I asked. Exactly where? I'd like to try the same font package/files here. Try opening the following in Firefox, Tor or SeaMonkey and report whether they display as you expect they should:
http://fm.no-ip.com/Auth/Font/fonts-comps-linliber.html
http://fm.no-ip.com/Auth/Font/font-roboto.html

Gregg Bell · 04-09-2017, 08:20 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mrmazda

I think your continued frustration with the subject is holding you back. Not all ?tf fonts are under truetype. Look a little harder.

A precise answer to your question of Emerson requires more information than you've provided in thread.

Code:

chown -R gregory:<gregory'shomegroup> ~/.fonts

is about as close as anyone can get.

OMG! You're like a school teacher! ("You really can do better than this, Gregg!") LOL Well, I am frustrated. I'll search deeper tomorrow. And what more info do you need about the Emerson thing? (I'm paranoid about running commands now.) Thanks.

mrmazda · 04-09-2017, 08:59 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gregg Bell

I'll search deeper tomorrow.

Why wait? From your last MC screenshot it should take you as few as 3 keystrokes to find them.

Quote:

And what more info do you need about the Emerson thing?

Read what I wrote: "gregory'shomegroup". It's something you should know, so should look up if you don't. Once you know the answer, you substitute it for "<" and ">" and what's in between. If it's still not clear, do 'man chown'.

Gregg Bell · 04-10-2017, 10:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mrmazda

Why wait? From your last MC screenshot it should take you as few as 3 keystrokes to find them.

Read what I wrote: "gregory'shomegroup". It's something you should know, so should look up if you don't. Once you know the answer, you substitute it for "<" and ">" and what's in between. If it's still not clear, do 'man chown'.

Okay, mrmazda. The good news! Thanks to the wonderful MC I was able to place the fonts into usr/share/fonts/truetype and they showed up in Pixeluvo, GIMP and LibreOffice! (That MC is SO MUCH better than the default terminal editor.)

Now to the chown thing. I get the r for recursion and the chown (kind of) changes the file owner so I'm taking control back from root??? I've never known how to write commands. I know the ~ is for "home."

Code:

chown -R /home ~/.fonts

I know that's not right because the ~ is 'home' but that's the best I could come up with.

mrmazda · 04-10-2017, 11:14 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gregg Bell

I know that's not right because the ~ is 'home' but that's the best I could come up with.

Don't. You seem to be mixing concepts. Try these learning exercises:

1-open MC, then do the following keystrokes after making the panel on the right side active:

Code:

F9
Down
L
L
O

Now observe what is shown in the columns labeled owner and group. These are what are sought to be modified by using the chown command. While in your home directory (~), all in the Owner column should (probably) be gregory, and none in either column (except for ..) should be root. We don't know what Group column should show (the unanswered questions of #22 & #25), but they should probably all be the same, and might be "user" or "users". At this point I invite your perusal of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_s...ix_permissions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_identifier and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_identifier .

2-in MC, do the following keystrokes

Code:

F9
F
O

Now observe that you can make selections that correspond to the content of 'man chown' and what you observed perusing the above URIs. The idea here is for you to learn why 'chown -R /home ~/.fonts' is not something for you to try, and what to do instead, either using the MC menu, or the chown command.

Gregg Bell · 04-11-2017, 11:03 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mrmazda

Don't. You seem to be mixing concepts. Try these learning exercises:

1-open MC, then do the following keystrokes after making the panel on the right side active:

Code:

F9
Down
L
L
O

Now observe what is shown in the columns labeled owner and group. These are what are sought to be modified by using the chown command. While in your home directory (~), all in the Owner column should (probably) be gregory, and none in either column (except for ..) should be root. We don't know what Group column should show (the unanswered questions of #22 & #25), but they should probably all be the same, and might be "user" or "users". At this point I invite your perusal of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_s...ix_permissions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_identifier and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_identifier .

2-in MC, do the following keystrokes

Code:

F9
F
O

Now observe that you can make selections that correspond to the content of 'man chown' and what you observed perusing the above URIs. The idea here is for you to learn why 'chown -R /home ~/.fonts' is not something for you to try, and what to do instead, either using the MC menu, or the chown command.

Okay, teach. Did the exercises. My owner name is gregory. My group name is gregory. So:

Code:

chown -R gregory:gregory ~/.fonts

Right?

The tutorial was very interesting, thanks, but still it was a lot to take in and not a little confusing. Like 'r' means 'read' but it also means 'recursion.' And chown is confusing too.

Let's take what led to all this. The command I'm trying to reverse is:

Code:

sudo fc-cache -fv ~/.fonts

And that command updated my ~/.fonts folder

The chown command changes the user or group ownership of each file.

So I updated the ~/.fonts . Why am I changing ownership to reverse it?

So now that my fonts are almost certainly completely wrecked by now, and my computer is about to catch on fire like a Samsung phone

what's next?

mrmazda · 04-12-2017, 12:16 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gregg Bell

Okay, teach. Did the exercises. My owner name is gregory. My group name is gregory. So:

Code:

chown -R gregory:gregory ~/.fonts

Right?

On the surface one would expect it to ensure that ~/.fonts and all it contains belongs to owner gregory and group gregory. But, take a look in ~/.fonts with MC and see. An ordinary user doesn't have power to wrest ownership from root.

Quote:

The tutorial was very interesting, thanks, but still it was a lot to take in and not a little confusing. Like 'r' means 'read' but it also means 'recursion.' And chown is confusing too.

Case matters in FOSS commands and filesystems. Don't trust your memory. Do 'fc-cache --help' or 'man fc-cache' to see -r and -R are quite different. Take a look at 'chown --help' and/or 'man chown' as well.

Quote:

Let's take what led to all this. The command I'm trying to reverse is:

Code:

sudo fc-cache -fv ~/.fonts

And that command updated my ~/.fonts folder

It did not. One of the reasons for the #27 exercise was to present an opportunity to discover so. fc-cache updates the fontconfig cache, not the content of ~/.fonts. If ownership of the content of ~/.fonts was or is bad, it's not because of running fc-cache.

Quote:

The chown command changes the user or group ownership of each file.

True.

Quote:

So I updated the ~/.fonts . Why am I changing ownership to reverse it?

In fact? Or, is that just something you think happened?

Quote:

So now that my fonts are almost certainly completely wrecked by now, and my computer is about to catch on fire like a Samsung phone

what's next?

Look around in MC some more. I doubt anything in ~ is wrong on account of anything I've read in this thread, but if there is, MC in long listing mode, as would 'ls -al | less', should make bad ownerships readily apparent.

mrmazda · 04-12-2017, 02:52 AM