Adding OpenType (OTF) fonts to X in Slackware 10.2
 

Running a stock slackware-current, I am trying to add my favorite OpenType (.OTF) fonts for use in X11 under Slackware.

I have the following relevant lines in my xorg.conf:I then copied my .otf files into /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/OTF/ and ran fc-cache (as root), giving such a directory :

However, I don't get any OTF fonts, and my /var/log/Xorg.0.log gives these lines:

Google told me I need to have type1 module loaded, but it is, and according to Xorg.0.log it is loaded without trouble. Have I missed any other modules or steps?

Any advise would be greatly appreciated!

-Y1

have you done
mkfontdir
and
mkfontscale
for the new dirs?

Hi kodon,

Thanks much for your reply - I had not ran mkfontdir and mkfontscale, and I recently ran both as root. However, it still doesn't work and I get the same error message in Xorg.0.log..

However, now I also have a fonts.scale file:
and a fonts.dir file with:
(single zero)

and fonts.cache-1 remains the same...

Could I be missing an X module (see table above) ?

-Y1

did you re-run `fc-cache -vv` (perhaps -f also)
after you made it a font directory?

Thanks again!

Looks like my OTH directory isn't even cached...

I have added the path in /etc/X11/xorg.conf, remains unchanged:
What could be the other reason why the OTF directory isn't scanned? (I'm running fc-cache as root, permissions not a problem (directory 755 and files 644)

Any other ideas?

try adding them to the font path...
`xset fp+ <dir>`
`xset fp rehash`

actually a mkfontdir in the parent
and a rehash should suffice.

Still doesn't work, neither from superuser nor normal user (with xhost + for superuser)

However, one thing strikes me as odd - when I run fc-cache -vv, it lists fc-cache: "/usr/share/fonts/wine": skipping, 0 fonts, 0 dirs even though this directory is not listed in /etc/X11/xorg.conf

At the same time, the directories in /etc/X11/xorg.conf are not scanned - could I have a configuration inconsistency somewhere?

-Y1

hmm. i'm not sure why you would need to modify
xhost permissions. and this should all
be performed as root...

Hi,

Reason why I had to do xhost +localhost was that xset uses X and thus requires authentication of some sort - as I _never_ login as root in X, it was needed.

However, I'm quite confident that the problem lies elsewhere, as the paths are correctly entered in /etc/X11/xorg.conf but still appear different in the logs and fc-cache -vv -f ...

Question: It would be interesting to know how many (if any?) have successfully installed OTF fonts in Slackware?

-Y1

Take a look at /etc/fonts/fonts.conf, I added a file called /etc/fonts/local.conf which is included automatically by fonts.conf to support artwiz fonts, my file looks like:

This isn't a Slackware specific issue, it's an X issue. :) According to Wikipedia, Freetype provides support for OTF. Do you have any TrueType fonts working on your system? It's late, so excuse stupid questions from me. :)

I noticed you have "freetype" specified twice in your X.org config file. Can you remove one of those and see if that changes anything? Where did you get your OTF fonts? If they can be downloaded, I can try one out on my system and see what happens. I'm running XFree86 4.6.0rc4, which isn't X.org but the freetype support should be the same. :)

Peace...

Solved!
 

That did the trick! I removed the extra truetype load, and added the OTF directory to /etc/fonts/fonts.conf, and restarted X with Ctrl-Alt-backspace, and now my OTF fonts show up perfectly.

Thanks much to everyone involved - This is greatly appreciated!!

A couple of closing questions:

1. the /etc/fonts/fonts.conf file specifically says not to edit the file as it is automatically generated - does this mean I should really have changed something else?

2. In Windows, the more fonts you add, the slower the system runs, as it keeps a list of fonts in memory - I assume there's no equivalent issues in X, but would like to have confirmed that adding more fonts won't bloat/slow my system?

Thanks again - now I can finally get my templates working again :)

-Y1

Well, you changed two things so we're not sure which one fixed your problem. :)

Try adding the duplicate "freetype" module to your X.org config file and see if your problem comes back or not. Then we'll know for sure what the culprit was. :)

As for Windows fonts and performance issues, I've got over 1000 Windows fonts installed on my system and my system runs well.

The only time I see a performance "hit" is when I use an app that loads ALL the fonts so I can pick another font to use. The font loading time is very slow on my system but normal usage isn't impacted at all.

Peace...

No change when dual freetype was added, but lost OTF when removed from fonts.conf so that's the culprit.

One interesting note though - while these fonts now show up when I do xlsfonts and also in Scribus and the KDE font program correctly, they are completely unreadable in OpenOffice.org 2.0(2). In the font list (they used to not appear at all), they are written in courier type themselves, and when I select the font, all text is less than 1 mm high and looks like fly droppings on the page.. This is not an issue in other apps than OpenOffice... Any ideas?

-Y1

Now I better understand why my Windows fonts work. I installed them in the /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts directory (in a sub-dir called Windows) which is already listed in /etc/fonts.conf so fc-cache knows to look there automagically when scanning for fonts to cache.

I have no idea on the OO issue.

Peace...

I have just made a bug report to OpenOffice on this. I found that OO2.0.2 does not let me use spadmin to add fonts --ttf or otf.
Somebody has made another report that OOm162 which is the test build just after 2.0.2 was crashing on Gentoo from spadmin.

So, OO on Linux currently does not support TTF or OTF?

Peace...

http://www.openoffice.org/FAQs/fontguide.html#5
explains how OOo accesses fonts. the link to
the setup guide should go over how to add fonts
to OOo...

(hmm...thought xset fp+ added dirs to that conf.
seems things have changed since i last used it)

[ahh. the guide is for OOo version 1.x]

Thanks for the linky. :)

Peace...

I see that I now have freetype 2.1.10 from the linuxpackages install about 6 months ago and now 2.1.9 is in the X11 directory. Has one of the several X11 updates sin the last few months overwritten it?

I know XFree86 comes with a version of FreeType that's not the latest (same with fontconfig and Mesa). So, whenever I upgrade XFree86, I also re-install the latest FreeType, FontConfig, and Mesa libraries also.

Maybe X.org is in a similar boat.

Peace...

I believe that all versions of Slackware X11 packages, including Slackware-Current, still include version 2.1.9 of Freetype. so that could explain why you have that version. Anyway, I believe version 2.1.9 to be far better if you want to get good rendering of MS truetype fonts. There are bugs in 2.1.10 with respect to certain fonts such as Verdana.

I dropped back to a 2.1.9 version with smoothing.
OO display and KOfficeprinting still not right so I tried using fontforge to convert to ttf and both wps work. I tried a year ago and at that time OO did not like the converted ttf so something is now better.

Yeap, you should've created a file called local.conf with a similar content to what I posted.

Yalla

As of now, OpenOffice.org does not support OpenType fonts under GNU/Linux. See:

http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=16032
http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/R...s&msgNo=127513 and the whole thread.