[Scribus] making fonts available to scribus..

[Peter Linnell]

On Sat, 2003-05-10 at 11:41, Florian Feigenbutz wrote:
> Hi guys,
> sorry for this bad newbie question but I'm now trying to master this
> problem for some weeks.. just don't get it.
> I'm using Debian unstable and use lots of Truetype fonts. GIMP, X and
> OpenOffice do recognize all of them but Scribus won't :( 
> I entered my font paths into ~/.scribus/scribusfont.rc. Starting Scribus
> from console gives the following output:

If you have one of the later versions 0.9.3+, this is obsolete.
> 
> > $ scribus
> > xset:  bad font path element (#72), possible causes are:
> >     Directory does not exist or has wrong permissions
> >     Directory missing fonts.dir
> >     Incorrect font server address or syntax
> > xset:  warning, no entries deleted from font path.
> 
> So I checked all font paths but didn't find any of those errors.. even
> when I copy one single Truetype font in my home dir and chmod' it to 777
> this error message appears..
> Can anybody help me?

I work principally on RH 8.0, so debian might be a bit different. And I 
do not know off hand what versions of Xfree86 are installed and if
fontconfig and Xft2 are packaged. If they are, you might find this page
helpful.

www.atlantictechsolutions.com/scribusdocs/redhat80.html




snipped from the docs:

True Type and Type 1 Font Installation Tips:
     1. Get the web fonts from http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/ BUT put
        the fonts in /usr/share/fonts/default/TTF. I like to keep my
        fonts paths as simple as possible.
     2. Follow the advice from http://www.graemepyle.com/linuxfonts.html
     3. Important make sure the font names are in lower case.
     4. After the fonts are installed, make sure you have the
        Xfree86-utils package. This contains ttmkfondir, Then as root,
        create a fonts.scale file, cd into the directory by the command:
        ttmkfdir -o fonts.scale
        for a directory of True Type fonts or for Type 1 fonts create
        the fonts.scale file using: 
         mkfontscale
     5. Then: as root: 
        fc-cache --force --verbose
        This will create new a fonts.dir and update the font cache. This
        replaces the mkfontdir command in Xfree 4.2
        
        
        
The key thing is to make the fonts.scale before creating fonts.dir. This
is probably what is generating the error message.

You will find font hadling much easier and more reliable in the latest
versions, especially if you have freetype2 installed and the devel
package installed when you compile scribus.

Hope that helps,
Peter