Windows fonts - some observations

[Antony Baxter <antony_baxter at yahoo dot co dot uk>]

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.


	
	
		
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