[PLUG] truetype font help

[Dean S. Messing]

On Mon, 9 Sep 2002, Dean S. Messing wrote:
< a sob story about not being able to get TTF fonts to work>

Keith Morse replied with a link to some helpful info.

Thanks Keith.

Paul Heinlein replied with a "magic incantation".

Thanks Paul.  I didn't try it but I now see that it
would probably have worked---depending on my root UMASK.

Finally, Felix Lee replied with:

 :: first guess: are the font files and the font dir readable by
 :: all?  xfs runs as an unprivileged user, not root.

Good guess.   The font dir and the font.{dir|scale} files were.
But the font files weren't.

That was it!  I suppose I should be embarassed, being
an old Linux hand hoodwinked by such a greenhorn trick.
But I'm not.  In fact I'm confused.
In my first attempt the .ttf font files were created with
root read permission for both owner and group:  -rw-r-----  root root

In another attempt it was -rw-r-----  deanm dvideo                      

Now I'm deanm.  And I'm in both group dvideo and group root.
Furthermore KDE was started by deanm (which is probably of no consequence).
Most important, `gfontsel' was started by both me and root in the many
times I tried to get the thing to work.  It was started on "The Command Line"
not by "binking" anything so in each case it should have been running
with the permissions of the executor---in which case it should have
been able to see the fonts.

Oh. Maybe I see.  I'm wonder ... (some seconds later)

xfs is running under UID "xfs".  That's it.  xfs couldn't get to the
fonts.  I can change their ownership, and then I can (if I like)
turn off world read bit.


 :: second guess: dunno.  everything you describe looks fine to
 :: me.  I just did the same thing a few months ago.  I got
 :: tired of the ugly imitation fonts that come with AbiWord.
 :: --

I like this guess.  It's usually the one I make.

Once again, eleven hours later, having pursued this to the bitter end,
I've picked up a few more crumbs of knowledge.  What a colossal
waste of time.

Dean

"The Average Linux Problem takes an averge of eleven hours to fix"