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Fixing fonts in 2008.0 [solved]


RVDowning
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When I installed 2008.0, it was the first time I renamed my home directory for the fresh install. I usually keep my home directory to that I retain my settings. However, many of my fonts now look like hell, namely the fonts used by Opera and Gnumeric.

 

Am I right in understanding that there is a font package I need to install from plf? What is its name? Is there anything I have to do after installing the font rpm?

 

Thanks.

 

 

[moved from Software by spinynorman]

Edited by RVDowning
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You might want to be a bit more specific - preferably with screenshots - about exactly what you think looks bad, and what you're expecting to see. Fonts are a very subjective thing, so it's not possible for anyone to know exactly how you want yours set up from the information you've provided.

 

The PLF thing you're thinking about is to do with the bytecode interpreter issue. Freetype has an element called a bytecode interpreter, to do with hinting, that is subject to a patent (an Apple patent, IIRC). Therefore the official Mandriva Freetype package has it disabled. The PLF package has it enabled. Some people prefer the look of fonts with the bytecode interpreter, some actually prefer them without (me, for instance). So, yes, you can install the libfreetype6 package from PLF if you want to use the bytecode interpreter, this *may* be your issue (but it is, as I said, impossible for me to tell for sure). All you have to do then is log out of your desktop and in again.

 

Note that someone is technically breaking the law when you do this, as you are in the U.S. I'm not entirely sure if it's technically you or the site you download from that breaks the law, I am not a lawyer and patent law is rather obscure. If you're not comfortable with this, you can download the freetype2 .src.rpm from the /official/2008.0/SRPMS/main/release directory on a Mandriva mirror and rebuild it with the --with-plf parameter. Distributing *source code* which infringes a patent is not illegal (which is why Mandriva can have the offending code in its .src.rpm but not its binary packages), and you rebuilding and using that source code on your own machine is *also* not illegal. Only the distribution of compiled code breaks patent law.

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sglafata: Mandriva 2008 has the Liberation fonts installed out of the box. The default font set for Mandriva is the DejaVu set, which is an extension of Vera with extra non-Roman characters added. It's thus pointless to install Vera on Mandriva (and it's not in the repos), as DejaVu is everything Vera is and more.

 

The Liberation fonts are used on 2008 whenever a Microsoft font (Arial, Times / Times New Roman, Courier New, Verdana, I think maybe a few others) is explicitly requested by an application or document. As mentioned, when no particular font is requested, or just the standard 'sans', 'serif' and 'monotype' aliases, DejaVu is used.

Edited by adamw
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MSTTCoreFonts (or whatever name it has on your distro) contains the whole set of the free Microsoft TrueType fonts for the web- namely:

andale, arial, comic, courier, georgia, impact, times, trebuchet, verdana, wd97 and webdings.

All other Microsoft fonts are not "free"- so you will not find them at a normal GPL distribution, but rather on a non-free repo (like PLF), or nowhere.

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HI, firstly, I'm using a cooker version from around Monday, before the official release hit the mirrors, and haven't upgraded to the official version yet, so this may be due to that. I've found that fonts on my box haven't been able to install from the built in font installer (very neat software, though doesn't seem to work...) found Papyrus font on the internet for free, and in the end had to copy it to /usr/share/fonts, then change the permissions to 755. Workds fine now. Also, as I bought a legal version of MS Windows XP some years ago, I've simply installed all the fonts from there... I've Windows running in Virtual Box. May as well get my money's worth... Anyway, not a major problem, and might be due again to Cooker, just thought I'd mention it.

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Got the issues resolved. My problems were that various applications were looking for Ariel and Verdana which weren't on the system. So, I got some good info from the chat group. I downloaded msttcorefonts-bootstrap-0.1-4brs.noarch.rpm and then did a urpmi on it and all is well. This downloads and installs the fonts.

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