send all fonts on my computer to printer

Dafydd · 05-27-2010, 05:37 PM

I need to write a command line script.

I have scribus install on my machine which someone suggested would do what I want. It does. But unfortunately I can not get it to work. The text print screen freezes when it is loading a font and will not respond.

One of the other disadvantages with scribus I did find was it wanted to print the fonts in all the size available and at 3 per page I have enough fonts to fill 607 pages.

I have googled, read all the scripting books I have, read several online tutorials and have not found a way to send a request for a certain style font to the printer from the command line.

Am I looking for the impossible? (unobtainable)
TIA
Dafy

Simon Bridge · 05-29-2010, 01:13 PM

Save your project to PDF, and print the PDF from evince.

Dafydd · 05-30-2010, 12:13 AM

I have 6300+ fonts loaded on my machine. I need to delete some. Foreign, runes , and others. I want to print each font in its style with its name. I read better from a book/page as opposed to clicking on each font in one of the fontmanagers.

A this link.
In section: 4.2 Printing TrueType font specimens

I found this code but have not had success.

Code:

xfstt --gslist --sync | printfont

I have installed the script below in /usr/bin/printfont

Code:

#!/bin/sh
##printfont
set -e
IFS= ')'

while read fontname rest
do
    cat << EOM | lpr
%!PS
(/usr/lib/ghostscript/5.50/prfont.ps) run
$fontname) DoFont
EOM
done

Produces this error:

Quote:

dave@dave:~/font$ xfstt --gslist --sync | printfont
/usr/bin/printfont: 4: ): not found
cannot write to font database!
sync failed.

ntubski · 05-30-2010, 07:35 AM

I don't understand why this line is needed

Code:

IFS= ')'

but it should be one of

Code:

IFS=' )'
or
IFS=')'

Quote:

cannot write to font database!
sync failed.

Perhaps the sync fails because your user lacks write permission, you would have to run this as root. Did you run this while X was started? The man page says

Code:

--sync Synchronize the font database with installed fonts and exit when
               done.  Don’t do this while xfstt is running.

Dafydd · 05-31-2010, 12:09 AM

I owe you a pomegranate, an orange or a beer or whatever. I've been using Ubuntu since release 7.04 and did not know until now there was a manual.

I've got some reading to do, I may or may not be back.

Simon Bridge · 06-01-2010, 01:00 AM

There is also an unofficial guide and a book.

There are unix manuals for pretty much every command. Enter

man <command>

in a terminal (no matter which distro) to read them. "man man" tells you how to use the man command. The apropos command can be used to find exact commands and their manuals. eg.

apropos font

gives you a list of every manual that has anything to do with fonts.

These are possibly the two most useful commands in the whole thing. If you want to look for a unix manual online - you can google for "man command" too. Of course, you still have to read the manual and understand it: they are usually more useful than your average help page, but harder to understand as a result.

I originally figured that if you were getting scribus to generate your sample text for printing, that it should be no trouble just to save what you had and use a different program to handle the printing. Also, if you use wysiwig, you can see where a font needs to be printed larger to see what it is ... but then, with a gui, you can browse to the font directory and the icons will show you a preview, and you can arrow-key through the collection, deleting the ones you don't like.

Then I realised that with 6300 fonts - there are no quick solutions. Fr eg. you could type a line in each font in OOo - but you'd be typing 6300 lines! We can get a script to print sample text in each font, but you still have to go back and find and delete them pretty much one at a time. So - just using the icon-preview (make the icons bigger to see it properly) and the del key seems the most efficient overall.

But then - I don't know how your fonts are organized.