Christopher Hicks wrote:

[ I sent out a similar message before Christmas, but I'm hoping that sending this out again now that everybody's recovered might have a better chance of evoking a response. For those seeing this twice, sorry. ]

I'm trying to get ttf fonts to work with gimp, but it seems like most of the fonts that my users want to use are causing the "This is a 2-byte font and may not display correctly." message to appear. The "may not display" in the message seems to consistantly translate into "renders in image as a tiny ugly font like the Windows System font". Is there any workaround for this? We're using gimp 1.2.3 on RedHat 8.0.

I've searched the web for hours and submitted a bug to Red Hat ( https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=80024 which includes a detailed way to reproduce the problem) all without coming up with anything. I'm not afraid of cvs, compiling, patching, converting the fonts somehow, or whatever, but I have no idea why it's happening or where to begin. Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.

I have NOT found a workaround for this particular problem, but I have found another way around it: don't use 2-byte TTFs! :) I know that is obvious and what I did was start installing various Windows TTFs so my font selection is now MUCH RICHER and I have no _need_ for the 2-byte TTFs that I wanted to use before because I had only a handful of TTFs to choose from.

I've been going to several sites that offer FREE Windows TTFs for download and then installing them in my X font set (using ttmkfontdir I believe is the utility) and now I've got a rich set of great Windows fonts and I don't even both with the 2-byte TTFs anymore.

At least, it's worth investigating... :)

Peace...

Tom

Christopher Hicks wrote:

On Mon, 27 Jan 2003, Tom Williams wrote:

Christopher Hicks wrote:

I'm trying to get ttf fonts to work with gimp, but it seems like most of the fonts that my users want to use are causing the "This is a 2-byte font and may not display correctly." message to appear. The "may not display" in the message seems to consistantly translate into "renders in image as a tiny ugly font like the Windows System font". Is there any workaround for this? We're using gimp 1.2.3 on RedHat 8.0.

I have NOT found a workaround for this particular problem, but I have found another way around it: don't use 2-byte TTFs! :)

But how can you tell what's going to be a 2-byte TTF and what's not?

I don't know how to tell if any given TTF is a 2-byte TTF from a techincal perspective. From a practical perspective, I've found the more "fancy" or "artistic" TTFs tend to NOT be 2-byte fonts and I haven't run into any problems with using them.

So, I guess the 2-byte problem (until GIMP is "fixed" or changed) really depends on which TTFs you need to use.

Peace.....

Tom

Keith Athey wrote:

Tom,

Could you list a few of the sites you liked for downloading windoze tffs?

I've been downloading my Windows TTFs from 1001freefonts.com (http://www.1001freefonts.com). They sell the fonts on a CD but you can download them individually, as I have been doing.

When you go to that site, click on "Enter here" and NOT "PCFonts" or "Mac fonts" as you will be directed to some other site.

If interested, I can send you samples of some of these fonts IN USE in an "Alien Glow" Script-Fu logo that I can create as a demo (Xtns/Script-Fu/Logos/Alien Glow).

I use these fonts in GIMP 1.2.3 on Linux (2.4.20 kernel) and XFree86 4.2.1.

Good luck! :)

Peace...

Tom