[20176] in Athena Bugs
linux: Adding Type1 and Truetype fonts disabled under Xfree4
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Arun A Tharuvai)
Mon Feb 11 13:59:29 2002
Message-Id: <200202111856.NAA20033@cutter-john.mit.edu>
To: bugs@mit.edu
Cc: aatharuv@mit.edu
Date: Mon, 11 Feb 2002 13:56:28 -0500
From: Arun A Tharuvai <aatharuv@MIT.EDU>
Summary:
One cannot arbitrarily add Type 1 and True Type fonts to the font path
any Athena Linux machine running XFree86 4.x without running an
additional font server. However, a simple fix to /etc/X11/XF86Config-4
would remove the need for doing so.
More details:
On Athena machines running XFree86 3.x, one can add Type 1 fonts to
the font path (assuming that there are appropriate fonts.dir and
fonts.scale file, and that the appropriate directories and files are
world readable, by typing (for example):
xset +fp /var/tmp/root/share/AbiSuite/fonts/
Doing this on an Athena Linux workstation (quiche-lorraine.mit.edu)
which was running XFree86 4.0.3 gave me the following error
athena% xset +fp /var/tmp/root/share/AbiSuite/fonts/
X Error of failed request: 86
Major opcode of failed request: 51 (X_SetFontPath)
Serial number of failed request: 9
Current serial number in output stream: 11
I got an identical error when trying to add a directory with True type
fonts to the font path.
Editing /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 on quiche-lorraine, I uncommented the following
lines under Section "Module"
# Load "freetype" # TrueType font handler
#Load "type1" # Adobe Type 1 font handler
Restarting the Xserver, I found that I could add Type1 and Truetype
fonts to my font path without any problems. The comment in
/etc/X11/XF86Config-4 states that one only needs to load those two
modules if you don't use xfs. However, xfs does not allow one to add
fonts without restarting (which would require restarting X with our
current X configuration). Also, root access is required to modify the
xfs config file, /etc/X11/fs/config, something I would think we would
not want to encourage users to be doing on cluster machines.
Arun
