A Tutorial Dave Bodenstab

imdave@synet.net

Wed Aug 7, 1996 This document contains a description of the various font files that may be used with FreeBSD and the syscons driver, X11, Ghostscript and Groff. Cookbook examples are provided for switching the syscons display to 80x60 mode, and for using type 1 fonts with the above application programs. There are many sources of fonts available, and one might ask how they might be used with FreeBSD. The answer can be found by carefully searching the documentation for the component that one would like to use. This is very time consuming, so this tutorial is an attempt to provide a shortcut for others who might be interested. There are many different font formats and associated font file suffixes. A few that will be addressed here are: .pfa, .pfb Postscript type 1 fonts. The .pfa is the Ascii form and .pfb the Binary form. .afm The font metrics associated with a type 1 font. .pfm The printer font metrics associated with a type 1 font. .ttf A TrueType font .fot An indirect reference to a TrueType font (not an actual font) .fon, .fnt Bitmapped screen fonts The .fot file is used by Windows as sort of a symbolic link to the actual TrueType font (.ttf) file. The .fon font files are also used by Windows. I know of no way to use this font format with FreeBSD. Which font file format is useful depends on the application being used. FreeBSD by itself uses no fonts. Application programs and/or drivers may make use of the font files. Here is a small cross reference of application/driver to the font type suffixes: Driver syscons .fnt Application Ghostscript .pfa, .pfb, .ttf X11 .pfa, .pfb Groff .pfa, .afm Povray .ttf The .fnt suffix is used quite frequently. I suspect that whenever someone wanted to create a specialized font file for their application, more often than not they chose this suffix. Therefore, it is likely that files with this suffix are not all the same format; specifically, the .fnt files used by syscons under FreeBSD may not be the same format as a .fnt file one encounters in the MSDOS/Windows environment. I have not made any attempt at using other .fnt files other than those provided with FreeBSD. First, a 8x8 font must be loaded. /etc/sysconfig should contain the lines: # Choose font 8x8 from /usr/share/syscons/fonts/* (or NO for default) font8x8=/usr/share/syscons/fonts/cp437-8x8.fnt The command to actually switch the mode is vidcontrol1: bash$ vidcontrol VGA_80x60 Various screen orientated programs, such as vi1, must be able to determine the current screen dimensions. These can be set with stty1: bash$ stty crt rows 60 columns 80 To make this more seamless, one can embed these commands in the startup scripts so it takes place when the system boots. One way to do this is: Modify /etc/sysconfig as above Add to /etc/rc.local: for tty in /dev/ttyv? do vidcontrol VGA_80x60 <$tty >/dev/null 2>&1 done Add to /etc/profile: TTYNAME=`basename \`tty\`` if expr "$TTYNAME" : 'ttyv' >/dev/null then stty crt rows 60 columns 80 fi References: stty1, vidcontrol1. X11 can use either the .pfa or the .pfb format fonts. The X11 fonts are located in various subdirectories under /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts. Each font file is cross referenced to its X11 name by the contents of the fonts.dir file in each directory. There is already a directory named Type1. The most straight forward way to add a new font is to put it into this directory. A better way is to keep all new fonts in a separate directory and use a symbolic link to the additional font. This allows one to more easily keep track of ones fonts without confusing them with the fonts that were originally provided. For example: Create a directory to contain the font files bash$ mkdir -p /usr/local/share/fonts/type1 bash$ cd /usr/local/share/fonts/type1 Place the .pfa, .pfb and .afm files here One might want to keep readme files, and other documentation for the fonts here also bash$ cp /cdrom/fonts/atm/showboat/showboat.pfb . bash$ cp /cdrom/fonts/atm/showboat/showboat.afm . Maintain an index to cross reference the fonts bash$ echo showboat - InfoMagic CICA, Dec 1994, /fonts/atm/showboat >>INDEX Now, to use a new font with X11, one must make the font file available and update the font name files. The X11 font names look like: -bitstream-charter-medium-r-normal-xxx-0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1 | | | | | | | | | | | | \ \ | | | | | \ \ \ \ \ \ \ +----+- character set | | | | \ \ \ \ \ \ \ +- average width | | | | \ \ \ \ \ \ +- spacing | | | \ \ \ \ \ \ +- vertical res. | | | \ \ \ \ \ +- horizontal res. | | | \ \ \ \ +- points | | | \ \ \ +- pixels | | | \ \ \ foundry family weight slant width additional style A new name needs to be created for each new font. If you have some information from the documentation that accompanied the font, then it could serve as the basis for creating the name. If there is no information, then you can get some idea by using strings1 on the font file. For example: bash$ strings showboat.pfb | more %!FontType1-1.0: Showboat 001.001 %%CreationDate: 1/15/91 5:16:03 PM %%VMusage: 1024 45747 % Generated by Fontographer 3.1 % Showboat 1991 by David Rakowski. Alle Rechte Vorbehalten. FontDirectory/Showboat known{/Showboat findfont dup/UniqueID known{dup /UniqueID get 4962377 eq exch/FontType get 1 eq and}{pop false}ifelse {save true}{false}ifelse}{false}ifelse 12 dict begin /FontInfo 9 dict dup begin /version (001.001) readonly def /FullName (Showboat) readonly def /FamilyName (Showboat) readonly def /Weight (Medium) readonly def /ItalicAngle 0 def /isFixedPitch false def /UnderlinePosition -106 def /UnderlineThickness 16 def /Notice (Showboat 1991 by David Rakowski. Alle Rechte Vorbehalten.) readonly def end readonly def /FontName /Showboat def --stdin-- Using this information, a possible name might be: -type1-Showboat-medium-r-normal-decorative-0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1 The components of our name are: Foundry Lets just name all the new fonts type1. Family The name of the font. Weight Normal, bold, medium, semibold, etc. From the strings1 output above, it appears that this font has a weight of medium. Slant roman, italic, oblique, etc. Since the ItalicAngle is zero, roman will be used. Width Normal, wide, condensed, extended, etc. Until it can be examined, the assumption will be normal. Additional style Usually omitted, but this will indicate that the font contains decorative capital letters. Spacing proportional or monospaced. Proportional is used since isFixedPitch is false. All of these names are arbitrary, but one should strive to be compatible with the existing conventions. A font is referenced by name with possible wild cards by an X11 program, so the name chosen should make some sense. One might begin by simply using …-normal-r-normal-…-p-… as the name, and then use xfontsel1 to examine it and adjust the name based on the appearance of the font. So, to complete our example: Make the font accessible to X11 bash$ cd /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1 bash$ ln -s /usr/local/share/fonts/type1/showboat.pfb . Edit fonts.dir and fonts.scale, adding the line describing the font and incrementing the number of fonts which is found on the first line. bash$ ex fonts.dir :1p 25 :1c 26 . :$a showboat.pfb -type1-showboat-medium-r-normal-decorative-0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1 . :wq fonts.scale seems to be identical to fonts.dir… bash$ cp fonts.dir fonts.scale Tell X11 that things have changed bash$ xset fp rehash Examine the new font bash$ xfontsel -pattern -type1-* References: xfontsel1, xset1, The X Windows System in a Nutshell, O'Reilly & Associates. Ghostscript references a font via its Fontmap file. This must be modified in a similar way to the X11 fonts.dir file. Ghostscript can use either the .pfa or the .pfb format fonts. Using the font from the previous example, here is how to use it with Ghostscript: Put the font in Ghostscript's font directory bash$ cd /usr/local/share/ghostscript/fonts bash$ ln -s /usr/local/share/fonts/type1/showboat.pfb . Edit Fontmap so Ghostscript knows about the font bash$ cd /usr/local/share/ghostscript/4.01 bash$ ex Fontmap :$a /Showboat (showboat.pfb) ; % From CICA /fonts/atm/showboat . :wq Use Ghostscript to examine the font bash$ gs prfont.ps Aladdin Ghostscript 4.01 (1996-7-10) Copyright (C) 1996 Aladdin Enterprises, Menlo Park, CA. All rights reserved. This software comes with NO WARRANTY: see the file PUBLIC for details. Loading Times-Roman font from /usr/local/share/ghostscript/fonts/tir_____.pfb... /1899520 581354 1300084 13826 0 done. GS>Showboat DoFont Loading Showboat font from /usr/local/share/ghostscript/fonts/showboat.pfb... 1939688 565415 1300084 16901 0 done. >>showpage, press <return> to continue<< >>showpage, press <return> to continue<< >>showpage, press <return> to continue<< GS>quit References: fonts.txt in the Ghostscript 4.01 distribution Now that the new font can be used by both X11 and Ghostscript, how can one use the new font with groff? First of all, since we are dealing with type 1 postscript fonts, the groff device that is applicable is the ps device. A font file must be created for each font that groff can use. A groff font name is just a file in /usr/share/groff_font/devps. With our example, the font file could be /usr/share/groff_font/devps/SHOWBOAT. The file must be created using tools provided by groff. The first tool is afmtodit. This is not normally installed, so it must be retrieved from the source distribution. I found I had to change the first line of the file, so I did: bash$ cp /usr/src/gnu/usr.bin/groff/afmtodit/afmtodit.pl /tmp bash$ ex /tmp/afmtodit.pl :1c #!/usr/bin/perl -P- . :wq This tool will create the groff font file from the metrics file (.afm suffix.) Continuing with our example: Many .afm files are in Mac format&hellip ^M delimited lines We need to convert them to unix style ^J delimited lines bash$ cd /tmp bash$ cat /usr/local/share/fonts/type1/showboat.afm | tr '\015' '\012' >showboat.afm Now create the groff font file bash$ cd /usr/share/groff_font/devps bash$ /tmp/afmtodit.pl -d DESC -e text.enc /tmp/showboat.afm generate/textmap SHOWBOAT The font can now be referenced with the name SHOWBOAT. If ghostscript is used to drive the printers on the system, then nothing more needs to be done. However, if true postscript printers are used, then the font must be down loaded to the printer in order for the font to be used (unless the printer happens to have the showboat font built in or on an accessible font disk.) The final step is to create a down loadable font. The pfbtops tool is used to create the .pfa format of the font, and the download file is modified to reference the new font. The download file must reference the internal name of the font. This can easily be determined from the groff font file as illustrated: Create the .pfa font file bash$ pfbtops /usr/local/share/fonts/type1/showboat.pfb >showboat.pfa Of course, if the .pfa file is already available, just use a symbolic link to reference it. Get the internal font name bash$ fgrep internalname SHOWBOAT internalname Showboat Tell groff that the font must be down loaded bash$ ex download :$a Showboat showboat.pfa . :wq To test the font: bash$ cd /tmp bash$ cat >example.t <<EOF .sp 5 .ps 16 This is an example of the Showboat font: .br .ps 48 .vs (\n(.s+2)p .sp .ft SHOWBOAT ABCDEFGHI .br JKLMNOPQR .br STUVWXYZ .sp .ps 16 .vs (\n(.s+2)p .fp 5 SHOWBOAT .ft R To use it for the first letter of a paragraph, it will look like: .sp 50p \s(48\f5H\s0\fRere is the first sentence of a paragraph that uses the showboat font as its first letter. Additional vertical space must be used to allow room for the larger letter. EOF bash$ groff -Tps example.t >example.ps To use ghostscript/ghostview bash$ ghostview example.ps To print it bash$ lpr -Ppostscript example.ps References: /usr/src/gnu/usr.bin/groff/afmtodit/afmtodit.man, groff_font5, groff_char5, pfbtops1. The TrueType font format is used by Windows, Windows 95, and Mac's. It is quite popular and there are a great number of fonts available in this format. Unfortunately, there are few applications that I am aware of that can use this format: Ghostscript and Povray come to mind. Ghostscript's support, according to the documentation, is rudimentary and the results are likely to be inferior to type 1 fonts. Povray version 3 also has the ability to use TrueType fonts, but I rather doubt many people will be creating documents as a series of raytraced pages :-). Using TrueType with groff is difficult because groff would need a font description file, and I know of no tools to construct the metrics from a TrueType font. In addition, the font would have to be downloaded to postscript printers in the appropriate format, and again, groff cannot handle TrueType fonts in this fashion. This rather dismal situation may soon change. The FreeType Project is currently developing a useful set of FreeType tools: The xfsft font server for X11 can serve TrueType fonts in addition to regular fonts. Though currently in beta, it is said to be quite useable. See Juliusz Chroboczek's page for further information. Porting instructions for FreeBSD can be found at Stephen Montgomery's software page. xfstt is another font server for X11, available under ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/X11/fonts. A program called ttf2bdf can produce BDF files suitable for use in an X environment from TrueType files. Linux binaries are said to be available from ftp://crl.nmsu.edu/CLR/multiling/General/. For people requiring the use of Asian TrueType fonts, the XTT font server may be worth a look. Information about XTT can be found at URL: http://hawk.ise.chuo-u.ac.jp/student/person/tshiozak/study/freebsd-at-random/x-tt/index-en.html. and others … The FreeType Projects page is a good starting point for information on these and other free TrueType projects. Many fonts are available on the Internet. They are either entirely free, or are share-ware. In addition, there are many inexpensive CDROMs available that contain many fonts. Some Internet locations (as of August 1996) are: ftp://ftp.winsite.com (Formerly CICA) http://www.simtel.net/simcgi-bin/dosfind.cgi ftp://ftp.coast.net/ http://af-pc-plloyd.ecel.uwa.edu.au/fonts/index.html http://www.esselte.com/letraset/index.html http://www.inil.com/users/elfring/esf.htm What use are the .pfm files? Can one generate the .afm file from a .pfa or .pfb? How to generate the groff character mapping files for postscript fonts with non-standard character names? Can xditview and devX?? devices be setup to access all the new fonts? It would be good to have examples of using TrueType fonts with povray and ghostscript.