Aerospace Software Ltd.

True-Type Fonts Howto Guide

Mandrake 9.1, 2003

Herman Oosthuysen

Aerospace Software Ltd., Copyright, 2003, GPL.

General

No computer is an island. Sooner rather than later, you have to exchange documents with a MS Windows PC and those documents invariably use Arial of Times New Roman fonts. If you want to see exactly what the document is supposed to look like, you need these fonts.

There are many font howto guides and they all suffer from being too complicated. All font server problems have been solved. This guide gives the few steps required to install True-Type Fonts manually, on a modern GNU/Linux system.

Where to get them

Microsoft was so kind as to make the Monotype fonts freely available. Other fonts are copyrighted. The free MonoType fonts are available on SourceForge.net.

You can get most fonts with the free MS Word Viewers here: http://www.microsoft. com:80/office/000/viewers.asp These viewers also run on wine and cxoffice.

Note that the font names must be lower case. Here is a script that can do that:

#!/bin/sh
#
## -------- convert upper to lower case ---------
ls * | while read f
do
if [ -f $f ]; then
if [ "$f" != "`echo \"$f\" | tr A-Z a-z`" ]; then
#Note that 'This' will overwrite 'this'!
mv -iv "$f" "`echo \"$f\" | tr A-Z a-z`"
fi
fi
done
## eof

Where do they go?

Fonts are installed in /usr/share/fonts.

Make a new directory and copy them:

#cd /usr/share/fonts
#mkdir monotype
#cp /your/stolen/fonts /usr/share/fonts/monotype/.

Configure the xft daemon to recognize the fonts

Add the font path, verify it, restart the font server and verify that they are working:

#chkfontpath --add /usr/share/fonts/monotype
#chkfontpath
#service xfs restart
#xlsfonts | less

Now all applications should be able to see the new Monotype fonts. Thanks Bill!

Hope this helps!

Herman