defoma & font servers ... confusion

hi everybody

i have some questions about fonts and font servers in debian. maybe someone can relief my confusion.

Is defoma a font server, like xfs?
How do different font servers behave, if there is more than one installed? (eg. xfs and a truetype server)
Or is defoma doing something else than xfs and I need both at the same time?
I configured manually some fonts and font paths without knowing about defoma, could this cause some unexpected behavior I see? (not very bad, though)

Thanks if someone could clarify one or more questions. I have edited too many files for today

stefan

macondo@debian:~$ apt-cache show defoma
Package: defoma
Priority: optional
Section: admin
Installed-Size: 500
Maintainer: Angus Lees <gus@debian.org>
Architecture: all
Version: 0.11.8-0.1
Depends: whiptail | dialog, file, perl (>= 5.6.0-16)
Recommends: libft-perl
Suggests: defoma-doc, psfontmgr, x-ttcidfont-conf, dfontmgr
Conflicts: defoma-x, defoma-ps, defoma-gs, psfontmgr (<< 0.5.0), x-ttcidfont-conf (<< 5), dfontmgr (<< 0.10.0)
Filename: pool/main/d/defoma/defoma_0.11.8-0.1_all.deb
Size: 77922
MD5sum: d11d7b51189fd81e48d6ef9f317d7b1d
Description: Debian Font Manager -- automatic font configuration framework
Defoma, which stands for DEbian FOnt MAnager, provides a framework
for automatic font configuration. An application whose configuration
of fonts usually requires manual intervention can automate the
process through Defoma, by installing a Defoma-configuration
script. The script gets called whenever a font is installed and
removed, so that the script may update the application configuration.

"How do different font servers behave, if there is more than one installed? (eg. xfs and a truetype server)
Or is defoma doing something else than xfs and I need both at the same time?"

There is no problem with different servers.

Follow the instructions for better fonts:
http://egads.ertius.org/~rob/font_guide.txt

Read the sticky at the top of the forum page:
Debian Configuration Post-install

it might answer other questions.
.

I haven't read too much about defoma (there's defoma-doc package in case you're interested) but, as far as I've understood, defoma is not font server and it doesn't conflict with any actual font servers you may want to use. Instead, defoma is a framework for automatically registering and configuring fonts that you install and also fonts that are shipped with the apps that you install.

You can enable or disable defoma by running (as root) "dpkg-reconfigure libpango1.0-common". Disabling defoma simply means that you must register and configure yourself all the fonts that you install. If you suspect that you've misconfigured some fonts and you want defoma to reconfigure all your fonts, you can use (as root) the command "defoma-reconfigure -f".

There's also a GUI frontend for defoma, dfontmgr, which you can install if you want to. dfontmgr should make it easy to configure individual fonts inside defoma framework. Hope this helps.

thanks a lot, both posts helped understanding some things.

defoma helps to register fonts... is this the same like manually cp the font in a directory that is in one of the lines in FontPath of XF86Config-4?
Or does it more?
(how can i view defoma-doc? i have it installed, but there is no defoma-doc command)

stefan

how can i view defoma-doc?

I'd suggest that you take a look at /usr/share/doc/ -- it's a very useful directory where you can find documentation for almost all the applications you've installed.

I'm trying to work with the document that macondo linked. I'd like to install msttcorefonts to see what they look like, whether they are sharper than the Bitstream fonts I have now.

According to
http://packages.debian.org/unstable/...corefonts.html
the package should be available from unstable. However, even though unstable is correctly listed in sources.lst, I get the following result:

# apt-get -t unstable install msttcorefonts
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
Package msttcorefonts is not available, but is referred to by another pack age.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
E: Package msttcorefonts has no installation candidate

I wouldn't know what to do with the files if I downloaded them from the Debian site I linked above; I don't think I've never installed anything without apt-get in Debian.

What could I be missing here?

msttcorefonts is in the contrib or non-free section.

you need to append contrib non-free to your sources.list

ie.:
deb ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/ testing main contrib non-free

Hrmm. Yeah, I guess that would do it!

Man I wish I would have found this thread 5 days ago! I have been really struggling getting Japanese to display correctly. I had gotten as far as getting Hiragana and Katakana to display, but Kanji would not. I made a couple slight changes to my font paths in my XF86Config-4 file and installed the list of recommended non-roman fonts and now it works great. I'm glad that nightmare of foreign language support is now over.

Is there an easy way to select default fonts using defoma? I have numerous Japanese fonts installed but the one it uses is one that is highly artistic and more difficult to ready.