Update: Much of this paper is no longer useful since Microsoft decided
to stop providing free access to their TrueType Web fonts in August
2002. However it appears that the fonts may have originally been
distributed with an 'End User License Agreement' that permitted
redistribution. The project at http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/
takes advantage of this and provides and RPM installer. You may find
this an ethically acceptable way to install these fonts in
Linux. Your call.
Web browsing from Netscape under Linux can be greatly improved by installing Microsoft's 'Web Core Fonts', since many mis-guided web designers either believe that these are available in all browsers, or end up using them without realizing it by following the defaults in design packages.
Microsoft (at least at present) make these fonts available in
TrueType format. Outline instructions for installing them, on
'standard' RedHat Linux systems from 6.0 onward, follow. This
procedure may work for other RedHat derived distributions, but depends
on RedHat's modified xfs
font server. A similar approach
will probably work in non RedHat derived distributions - see the
references below for further advice.
This procedure has been tested on RedHat 6.2 and 7.0. It looks as though it should work on 7.1. However there can be no guaranties. Even though the instructions below don't always say so, you are strongly advised to make backup copies of all configuration files before you alter them, and to be sure that you know how put the originals back in case of problems, and how to do this even if your X windows server will not itself start. If
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fontpack/default.htm
.
Download the 'Windows 9x, NT and Windows 2000' versions where
available. Be sure to check the 'End User
License Agreement' to ensure that you proposed use is legal..exe
' files are 32-bit
CAB archives. These can be unarchived under Linux with cabextract,
which can be found at http://www.kyz.uklinux.net/cabextract.php3
.
.ttf
files. Copy the
.ttf
font files to a central location. I used
/usr/local/share/fonts/ttfonts/
. The other extracted
files can be deleted.
#!/bin/sh ls * | while read f do if [ -f $f ]; then if [ "$f" != "`echo \"$f\" | tr A-Z a-z`" ]; then #Note that 'This' will overwrite 'this'! mv -iv "$f" "`echo \"$f\" | tr A-Z a-z`" fi fi done
font.scale
and font.dir
index
files by running
ttmkfdir -o fonts.scale mkfontdir
fonts.alias
[Optional, but
useful]. Netscape seems to get confused by scalable fonts and only
offers 0 and 12 point sizes in Edit -> Preferences.. -> Appearance ->
Fonts. You can get round this using alias fonts. Details and a Python
script to do the work are available at http://home.c2i.net/dark/linux.html#fuzzy
,
or you can just use a pre-built alias
file. Put this in the same place as the fonts.
which will also prompt the font server to re-read it's configuration.chkfontpath --add /usr/local/share/fonts/ttfonts
should show that the new fonts are now available. Netscape should pick them up when it is next re-launched, and the test page atxlsfonts | grep microsoft
http://www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/~jw35/beyond/fonts.html
should demonstrate this.
If, after doing all this, your new fonts still don't appear in
xlsfonts
output, then double-check how you copy of
XFree86 is obtaining its fonts. Look in
/etc/X11/XF86Config
for entries labeled
'FontPath
'. There should be an entry that reads
'unix/:-1
' (RedHat 6.x) or 'unix/:7100
'
(Redhat 7.x). If not you are not using the font server. You might be
able to fix the problem by adding an appropriate entry and restarting
your X server.
Most of the above is just a re-hash of information from a number of other documents, any or all of which may be useful if the instructions above don't work or if you want to apply them to non-RedHat systems. These are:
http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/mini/FDU/index.html
http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/Font-HOWTO.html
http://home.c2i.net/dark/linux.html#ttf
http://people.redhat.com/~mgalgoci/fonts/fixing.html
http://whttp://www.kegel.com/linux/tt.htmlww.kegel.com/linux/tt.html
http://www.redhat.com/knowledgebase/newfontsystem/
.