[Skencil-users] Font installation again (help needed)

[jbiddier]

Lothar Birk wrote:
> Hi, 
> I know this has been discussed several times on the list and "J" posted
> his extensive fontdoc documentation.


>  May be I am too dumb to understand,
> but I still cannot figure out what to do.
No you are not. It is just that difficult at first. It took me two years 
to get he understanding I have :-).

>  I probably tried all possible
> combinations but nothing seems to work.
>
> For us simple minded persons could an expert just summarize the
> steps (sequence of commands)
> 1. ...
> 2. ...
> ...
>
>   
Yes that would help. I did not finish the "task summary" section for the 
font doc that did just that 1, 2, ... of the whole process. I should get 
to that sometime.

> that make skencil fonts work on a fresh Fedora 5 installation where
> skencil has been installed from rpm.
>
>   

I can't find the E-mail I posted on how to get Fedora C2 to find fonts 
(I no longer have a RedHat or Fedora Box). That would most likely solve 
your problem, fast. I will look again later to see if I can find it. 
until then:

First you need to find your X11 and Ghostscript fontpaths:

For most Linux systems X11's font path is :

/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/

For ghostscript it differs for each Linux. In most cases:

/usr/share/ghostscrip/<version>/fonts

But I remember that for RedHat 8 and Fedora C2 this is not the case. It 
is something like /usr/share/defaults/fonts/Type1 – Not sure. Use the 
chkfontpath -l command to see the X11 paths.

Once you have the paths, you can start.


1)

Edit your config.py file:

not sure your install directory, but if the directory prefix is /usr, 
then it is /usr/lib/skencil-<version>/Sketch/Base/.


FROM:

font_path = ['/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1',
             '/usr/share/ghostscript/fonts',
             '/usr/lib/ghostscript/fonts']

TO:

font_path = ['/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1',
             '/usr/share/ghostscript/<version>/fonts']

(here I use /usr/share/ghostscript/<version>/fonts, but you will use something else).


2)

You can use the mksfd.py script (provided on the fontdoc web page) to 
make the sfds.

python ./mksfd.py -d /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1 -s ./x11.sfd

This will make the sfd file with nake “x11.sfd” in your current 
directory. Do the same for the ghostscript directory (call that one 
“gs/sfd”).

Copy each file to the directory it references.

cp ./x11.sfd /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1

(do the same for ghostscript's sfd file)


3)

Now I would like to clear out the Fontmetrics directory, but if I 
remember, Fedora C2 did not like that. So this step may not work for 
you. But try it.

Empty out the Fontmetrics directory 
(/usr/lib/skencil-<version>/Resources/ directory). You should make a 
holding place for the files in your home directory

mkdir safeplace

cd /usr/lib/skencil-<version>/Resources/

mv ./* ~/safeplace

IV)
Start Skencil look at the fonts menu. It it is blank, that's not good, 
but happens ;-). In that case move the files in “safeplace” back and 
remove the x11.sfd and gs.sfd from their directories. Then e-mail this 
list that it failed.

I can trouble shoot your case from there.

What I will need if that happens:

1. A copy of your fonts.scale file from /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/

2. A copy of your ghostscript directory fonts.scale (or fonts.dir) file.

3. An ls out put for those directories (for example: ls 
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/ > ls_x11.txt)

I can make a custom std.sfd and alais.sfd file for you.



Thanks.



--J