Windows fonts - some observations
Antony Baxter
antony_baxter@yahoo.co.uk
Mon May 10 15:18:00 GMT 2004
Hello,
I've been playing around with getting Windows fonts
working with
Cygwin/X, and have largely been successful, so wanted
to share this info
in case anyone else wants to try.
Getting Truetype fonts to work with FreeType was a
doddle; I made a
~/.fonts dir, symlinked /mnt/windows/fonts/*.ttf in
there, ran fc-cache,
and then was able to run
xterm -fa "fontname"
where 'fontname' was any entry from the output of
fc-list. With some
setting up of LANG, LC_ALL, etc, I was even able to
get a pretty good
coverage of the UTF-8 demos and tests (eg:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/examples/UTF-8-demo.txt
).
However, I failed to get Windows Bitmap Fonts ( .fon
files ) working in
the same way. As I understand it, FreeType 2 should
support these ok; I
symlinked /mnt/win.../*.fon into my ~/.fonts dir, ran
fc-cache, tried
e.g xterm -fa "Small Fonts", but everything appeared
as white-on-white.
I tried setting the foreground color, background
color, etc, but nothing
ever appears except the cursor. Anyone else seen this?
I'm not currently
able to try this under on another setup, so could
easily be my screw up.
Getting Truetype fonts to work with ttmkfdir also
worked well (it can be
downloaded from http://fundin.f2g.net/download.html -
follow the
instructions in the README ), and I was able to run eg
xterm
-fn "-microsoft-comic sans
ms-heavy-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1"
Not every entry generated by xlsfonts was usable -
fonts with a registry
value of "ascii" for instance couldn't be found when
starting xterm,
though this is quite possibly to do with some of my
other settings.
Finally, I was also fairly successful in converting
.fon fonts into bdf
fonts using the fnt2bdf utility supplied with Wine. I
downloaded the
latest Wine src ( from http://www.winehq.com ), ran
configure, make dep
and make, which eventually bombed out, but not before
the fnt2bdf
utility in the tools directory had been built. Using
this I was able to
convert all of my .fon fonts into bdf fonts, popped
these in a directory
and xset +fp'ed it. Running fontsel showed up all of
these fonts;
however selecting certain ones then caused xfontsel to
crash.
As always, YMMV, but I hope someone finds this useful.
Tony.
____________________________________________________________
Yahoo! Messenger - Communicate instantly..."Ping"
your friends today! Download Messenger Now
http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com/download/index.html
More information about the Cygwin-xfree
mailing list