[clue-tech] fonts

[Jed S. Baer]

On Sun, 14 Sep 2008 19:57:24 -0600
Keith Hellman wrote:

> 1. I run debian testing, not Ubuntu, so it would be nice if a Ubuntu
> user on the list could confirm that dpkg is there.  I suspect it is, but
> I don't have any systems to check that against.

Yeah, it's there. Ubuntu sometimes seems a bit nuts, but not that nuts. 

> 2. This assumes you know the mapping between disk path name and "the
> ugly font I see in some font selection dialog box".  I can't honestly
> say I know how to determine that mapping...

Well, for TTF, at least every one I've ever encountered, the file name is
the font name, e.g. tahoma.ttf provides the Tahoma font. Now that I've
said that, I'm sure somebody will mention an exception. You have to take
into account that some (all, most?) of these files have silly 8-char DOS
style filenames (throwback to Win 3.1 or something), so you get things
such as sqr721dn.ttf which requires a bit of thought to correlate, but it
is "Square 721 Dm", but it matches up.

For Type1 font files, you can just cat the fonts.dir file: (here's just
the top 3, wrapped bletcherously for e-mail standards, but I'll stick an
extra line between 'em.)

jbaer at robinson:/usr/share/fonts/X11/Type1$ cat fonts.dir
32
c0419bt_.pfb -bitstream-courier 10
pitch-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-m-0-adobe-standard 

c0419bt_.pfb -bitstream-courier 10
pitch-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-m-0-ascii-0

c0419bt_.pfb -bitstream-courier 10
pitch-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-m-0-iso10646-1

This is, I suppose, of dubious usefulness, unless you really understand
how Type1 fonts work. But it does give you the face name anyway. If I
were going to get rid of fonts files I wasn't interested in, I'd get rid
of all the variants of a particular face, I think, so a little use of
grep would identify all files containing variants on that face (e.g.
bold, demibold, normal italic, etc.)

The issue with removing an entire font package is that it'll remove all
the fonts contained in that package. Not what Bob wants, most likely. I
have only 7 font packages installed, but a heaping pile o' fonts. I
wouldn't recommend removing X-fonts-base, for example.

And I don't know what happens if you just wipe the font files themselves.
If I did that, I'd rerun mkfontdir in each directory where I did that.
And I'd also make sure I knew which files comprise a group, since IIRC
there are 2 or 3 files which together make up the complete font spec
(still talking just Type1 here).

IOW, fonts in Linux, except for TrueType, aren't something to casually
mess about with, IMHO, now I think about it.

jed