Today, I installed some new fonts on my Red Hat 9 box and I figured out some interesting stuff.

Funky with Fonts

I had already installed the Vera Bitstream Vera TrueType fonts shortly after the GNOME project had announced they were being made available under a Free license. Installing them, however, took some manual tweaking. I am happy to see Gavin Graham has “done the needful” and packaged up an RPM for these fonts.

You can download this RPM from <http://www.users.bigpond.net.au/gavindi/ttf-bitstream-vera-1.10-1.noarch.rpm>

As Avi Alkalay points out, “Microsoft invests time and money to provide a nice and clean look and feel with high quality fonts like Verdana and Tahoma.” I guess we can give credit where credit is due.

Avi has packaged many popular Microsoft fonts up into an RPM which is freely downloadable for anyone who owns a Microsoft Windows license since, technically, you could install these fonts off your Windows installation if you knew how.

You can download the msfonts RPM from <http://webperf.org/msfonts/msfonts-1.2.1-1.noarch.rpm>.

Dustin over at Dustismo.com has a bunch of fonts available for downloading. You can see his fonts at <http://www.dustismo.com/site/fonts.html>. These fonts aren't packaged as RPMs, but many of them have been released under the GPL and include installation instructions. For example, for the Dustismo font, here are the installation instructions:

make new directory:
/usr/share/fonts/Dustismo

copy the following files into the new directory:
dustismo_bold_italic.ttf
dustismo_bold.ttf
dustismo_italic.ttf
Dustismo.ttf
Dustismo_Roman.ttf

in the new directory do:
$ ttmkfdir >fonts.dir

Then run chkfontpath:
$ /usr/sbin/chkfontpath
---you will see: ----------
Current directories in font path:
1: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc:unscaled
2: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi:unscaled
3: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi:unscaled
4: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc
5: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1
6: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Speedo
7: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/cyrillic
8: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF
9: /usr/share/fonts/default/Type1
10: /usr/share/fonts/msttcorefonts
11:
12: /usr/lib/openoffice/share/fonts/truetype
--------- end ------------

Now you have to add the new directory to the font path:
$ chkfontpath --add=/usr/share/fonts/Dustismo

Now restart the font server so the changes take effect:
$ /etc/init.d/xfs restart

Then type
$ xset fp rehash

It should be pretty easy to create RPMs for these fonts. Maybe I'll try my hand at it.