Re: ttmkfdir no longer needed

[Harold L Hunt II <huntharo at msu dot edu>]

Nicholas Wourms wrote:
> Harold L Hunt II wrote:
>
> > It looks like we no longer need ttmkfdir in order to expose the fonts 
> > installed with Windows to X11.  The mkfontscale utility that is 
> > included with out distribution was inspired by ttmkfdir and 
> > essentially replaces it:
>
>
> That's not what it says, at least it makes no claim to be a full 
> replacement.  It mentions only that it is inspired from the original 
> ttmkfdir, but I don't think it in the same class as the latest version 
> (ttmkfdir-3.x) from RedHat.  In fact, RedHat still retains and uses it 
> to this day, even in the bleeding-edge Fedora's (which, BTW, are also 
> using xorg-x11 for X11).  IIRC, Mike Harris says in specfile that while 
> mkfontscale is adequate for latin font encodings, it doesn't work all 
> that well with unicode and other complex encodings.  Since I speak 
> English, I can't confirm nor deny if this is true, but if Mike is still 
> using it for RedHat's TTF's, then I'd have to say there is some truth to 
> it.

Well, since we've never had a ttmkfdir package we aren't missing 
anything that we previously had.

> > You can do something like the following right now (well, not with 
> > Cygwin 1.5.9 since mkfontscale will core dump, you have to use 
> > snapshot of cygwin1.dll for the moment):
> >
> > 1) mkfontscale /cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/Fonts
> >
> > 2) mkfontdir /cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/Fonts
> >
> > 3) Launch Cygwin/X
> >
> > 4) In a bash shell under Cygwin/X, run:
> >
> >    xset fp+ /cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/Fonts
> >
> > 5) Run xfontsel and observe that picking 'microsoft' from the 'rgstry' 
> > category exposes 'microsoft sans serif', 'tahoma', and 'verdana' among 
> > others under the 'fmly' category.  Note also that valid chartacters 
> > appear when you select these fonts.
> >
> >
> > Due to this I am going to pull the link to ttmkfdir from our 'Ported 
> > Software' page.  Perhaps someone would like to write a postinstall 
> > script that creates symlinks to the Fonts folder for Windows under 
> > /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/windows, then runs mkfontscale and mkfontdir 
> > in that folder (since we can not guarantee that we have permissions to 
> > create files in the actual Fonts folder for Windows).  Then it would 
> > take a minor adjustment of our startup scripts to pass this additional 
> > font folder to Cygwin/X on startup.
> >
> > Any takers?  I'll package it if somebody works the kinks out of it.
>
>
> I would *strongly* advise against any action which would work directly 
> in and/or on a user's system's FONTS dir.

Let me clarify, I meant that we should create symlinks to the Windows 
fonts (think lndir here, not a single link to the folder containing the 
fonts) and that we should run mkfontscale and mkfontdir in our directory 
that just contains linkes to the Windows fonts.  Please address your 
comments to that scenario.

Harold