All of the fonts you use in Gimp come from the X server. There is no internal font render in Gimp, so Gimp needs X to render the fonts. This is also the reason why the text tool dialog looks a bit like the xfontsel program in X.
First of all, use scalablefonts (Type 1 or Speedo) in Gimp. As you can tell from the name, these fonts can be scaled up and down without losing in quality. There are also bitmapped fonts in X. When you scale a bitmap font, it will lose its shape and get very jaggy and ugly.
To find out where in your system X keeps its fonts, type: xset -q <enter> in a shell. The last line in the output tells your font path. If you are an XFree86 user, and use the default XF86 configuration, you have to make some editing to make sure that the Type 1 and Speedo font are the first to come up when X is looking for a certain font. It's very simple, just place the Speedo and Type 1 directories first in your Fontpath.
An other way is to add a string :unscaled after your bitmap fonts. If you add this string the scalable i.e the type 1 fonts will be used if you need to scale up or down your font. The font path in the XF86Config file may the look like this.(Note this may only work with XFree 86)
Section "Files" RgbPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/rgb" FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc:unscaled" FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi:unscaled" FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi:unscaled" FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/MY_NEW_FONTS" FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1" FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Speedo" FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc" FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi" FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi" EndSection
If you can stand that your fonts in Xwindow will look a bit odd, i.e when an unscaled font would normally be used, instead a scalable type 1 font will be used the set all your type 1 fonts before the bitmap fonts.
To find out what kind of Type 1 fonts you have; change directory to the Type 1 dir, and read the fonts.dir file (e.g cd /usr/X11/lib/X11/fonts/Type1 && more fonts.dir) in a terminal window and all your available Type 1 fonts will be displayed. One of the most common reasons for a Script-Fu to fail, is that the specified Script-Fu font isn't available. This makes the script bug and there will be no output.
We will only cover Type 1 fonts (postscript fonts) other font types are beyond the scope of this chapter. The first thing you have to do is to download a program called type1inst (written by James Macnicol) from ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/X11/xutils or one of its mirrors.
At the time of this writing, the file is called type1inst-0.6.tar.gz. Unpack the program like you did with the Gimp archive (see chapter 4). Copy the files type1inst and t1embed to a directory in your PATH, for example /usr/local/bin.
To see your PATH, execute the following in a shell: echo $PATH. If you aren't the system administrator, then you probably can't install files in system directories. To overcome this problem, create a bin directory in your home directory and install the type1inst program there. To include the program in your PATH, do the following if you run Bash, Sh or Ksh as your shell:
export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin
Now copy The Type 1 fonts that you want to install in a directory of your own choice. A word of advise: If you have a large font collection, and you want easy font management in Gimp, install an xfontserver, or install the fonts in different directories with, say 20 fonts in each.
Here's how we manage fonts at Frozenriver: Karin needs a lot of fonts, but if you load all fonts into X and Gimp, it becomes hard to choose and find the right font. We have solved this by making different directories for each type of font, e.g we have one directory for artistic fonts and one for strict business fonts and so on. This makes it easy for Karin to load and unload the fonts depending on what she wants to do.
When you have copied the fonts, cd to the directory where you installed the fonts, and run type1inst. This will create the necessary font.dir and font.scale file in this directory.
Now you can load the fonts into X by applying xset +fp full path to the font directory. The fonts are now installed and you can use them in Gimp, but if you installed them while you had Gimp running, you must restart Gimp.
Please notice that the + is placed in front of fp. If you put it in the wrong place, the all the default font directories will be queried of the font name first, and if there is a font with the same name as yours this font will be used instead of your own.
The Helvetica font is a good example. The standard Helvetica font that comes with X is of quite poor quality, but if you download Acrobat Reader from Adobe, it will also include some new fonts including a very nice Helvetica font.
If you install these fonts with xset fp+ you will never see them, because the standard Helvetica font that comes with X, is placed in front of the font you installed when X is looking for its font directories. So make sure that you do it right, otherwise you will be wasting valuable fonts (and maybe money too).
It's not always possible to use the type1inst program. In that case, you'll have to do it the hard way and install the fonts.* files by hand.
Generally you have to load the fontfile to a text editor and look in the file header for name, type etc.... The header of the file ends with the eexec command, and everything after that is binary font data and of little interest. Note that you can only do this with ps font files. Such files normally end with .pfb and have %!PS-AdobeFont typed in the first line of the file.
The first thing you need to understand is how to code the font field in the font.scale file. Here is an example line![Extracted pic [1]](Fonts-image-1.jpeg)
:
All you have to do now is to load the pfb in a file editor (like vi file.pfb) in a terminal such as xterm, and search for data. Here's what to look for:
We know that this is probably not the best description of font decoding, but if we were to describe it in depth we could make a book out of it.
In the end of this chapter you'll find some tables that can help you with your decoding. They are taken from the source of the type1inst program.
Generally, you don't have to worry, because type1inst will make the job for you. But sometimes it will not get the Foundry information, and then you can take a look in the font file or the log file which type1inst creates. Most of the time, it's quite easy to figure out what's missing.
| Slants | Slant |
|---|---|
|
italic |
i |
|
roman |
r |
|
regular |
r |
|
cursive |
i |
|
kursiv |
i |
|
oblique |
o |
|
obl |
o |
|
slanted |
o |
|
upright |
r |
|
inclined |
i |