Hi,

"Matthew Lewis" writes:

This may be a configuration issue, but 1.3.10 only uses a small subset of the fonts available to X. Gimp 1.2.3 has no trouble using all the available fonts, so I don't believe it's xfs problem. Any ideas?

this is indeed a configuration issue. GIMP-1.3 doesn't use X11 to render fonts. It does however share the configuration file with the Xft font rendering system. You need to set up /etc/X11/XftConfig. The file format is described in Xft(3).

Salut, Sven

Hi,

"Matthew Lewis" writes:

The man page wasn't much help. I added the relevent directories to the XftConfig file and restarted xfs just in case, but Gimp is still refusing to use anything other than the default fonts. Could someone post a copy of their XftConfig file as an example of how to add font libraries to Gimp?

I will say it again: GIMP-1.3 does _not_ make use of X11 to render fonts. It thus doesn't make any sense to restart xfs since the font server is not involved at all.

Adding the font directories to /etc/X11/XftConfig should do the trick. Here's an example line:

dir "/usr/local/share/fonts/TrueType"

Please note that you need scalable fonts, not necessarily TrueType, but scalable.

Salut, Sven

Hi,

"Matthew Lewis" writes:

After some research, I've discovered some things about fonts, gimp, and linux. (Some of this may be old news to many of you, but it was new to me because I'm not a font expert.) On RH8.0 (and probably other dist's as well) there are 3 font handlers. The first is the traditional X font server "xfs" or "xfstt" on some systems. The other two font handlers are Xft and the new Xft2. Xfs gets it's configuration from the familiar /etc/X11/XF86Config file and from /etc/X11/fs/config. Nothing new here. The Xft font handler uses /etc/X11/XftConfig for it's config (it may also be in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11 as well). But the newest version of Xft called Xft2 uses a pair of new config files which live in /etc/fonts called "fonts.conf" and "fonts.dtd".

RedHat ships with development versions of Pango so this is a RedHat-only situation. They may have had good reasons to do this. However this is totally unrelated to fonts in the GIMP text tool since the GIMP text tool doesn't use X11 to render fonts. It uses PangoFT2 which only happens to share a configuration file with PangoXft.

This situtation kinda sucks because I have a lot of nice looking fonts which are useless under 1.3.10, but work perfectly under 1.2.3. I'm not sure why the font hadlers have become so fragmented under X/Gnome/Gimp, but it would be nice if there was some way to regain the use of the font libraries which worked under earlier versions of Gimp.

I wouldn't say that the fonts worked perfectly under GIMP-1.2.3 since if anything sucks than it's the text tool in GIMP-1.2. The new tool however is under development and subject to changes. You better stop complaining. Then you should decide if you want to help with that development. Any help is appreciated. If all you want to do is to use The GIMP, you better delete GIMP-1.3.10 today and wait till we call it a stable version.

Salut, Sven

Hi back,
On 2002-12-13 at 1741.32 +0100, Sven Neumann typed this:

Hi,

"Matthew Lewis" writes:

After some research, I've discovered some things about fonts, gimp, and linux. (Some of this may be old news to many of you, but it was new to me because I'm not a font expert.) On RH8.0 (and probably other dist's as well) there are 3 font handlers. The first is the traditional X font server "xfs" or "xfstt" on some systems. The other two font handlers are Xft and the new Xft2. Xfs gets it's configuration from the familiar /etc/X11/XF86Config file and from /etc/X11/fs/config. Nothing new here. The Xft font handler uses /etc/X11/XftConfig for it's config (it may also be in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11 as well). But the newest version of Xft called Xft2 uses a pair of new config files which live in /etc/fonts called "fonts.conf" and "fonts.dtd".

RedHat ships with development versions of Pango so this is a RedHat-only situation. They may have had good reasons to do this. However this is totally unrelated to fonts in the GIMP text tool since the GIMP text tool doesn't use X11 to render fonts. It uses PangoFT2 which only happens to share a configuration file with PangoXft.

This situtation kinda sucks because I have a lot of nice looking fonts which are useless under 1.3.10, but work perfectly under 1.2.3. I'm not sure why the font hadlers have become so fragmented under X/Gnome/Gimp, but it would be nice if there was some way to regain the use of the font libraries which worked under earlier versions of Gimp.

I wouldn't say that the fonts worked perfectly under GIMP-1.2.3 since if anything sucks than it's the text tool in GIMP-1.2. The new tool however is under development and subject to changes. You better stop complaining. Then you should decide if you want to help with that development. Any help is appreciated. If all you want to do is to use The GIMP, you better delete GIMP-1.3.10 today and wait till we call it a stable version.

my gimp-1.2 gets ttf fonts via the development plug-in gimp-freetype. the default text tool and the stable dynamic text plug-in are not able to see the ttf fonts.

my gimp-1.3 text tool cannot find the ttf fonts. i was sort of waiting for a "Configure" button to pop up on one of my builds.

i was sort of excited about the original mail in this thread, as it was the first thing i read that seemed to start to make sense of my font problems.

i am running mostly debian testing, but i was willing (and would be willing again) to run a broken half sid machine to get ttf to my stable gimp.

if you are curious about what i have done to fix my font problem, i could dig up about 10 different how-tos. from apt-get, from xfce, from nice swedes trying to help ....

this is the first one that didn't work for me: http://carol.gimp.org/pdbv/package/anti-aliasing-howto_4%3A2.2.25.html

what are the chances that a [Configure] will appear on the text tool dialog in the near future?

carol

Hi,

Carol Spears writes:

what are the chances that a [Configure] will appear on the text tool dialog in the near future?

I'm not sure if there's a way for an application to change the PangoFT2 font configuration on the fly. I'd prefer not to implement such a beast and would rather put some effort into documenting the configuration via XftConfig.

Salut, Sven