Re: Freetype Font Path

[Lars Clausen <lrclause cs uiuc edu>]

On Thu, 7 Mar 2002, Robert Young wrote:
>> Lars Clausen wrote
>> On Thu, 7 Mar 2002, Robert Young wrote:
>> > G'Day,
>> > 
>> > The recent --enable-freetype CVS build has been segfaulting 
>> on me and I
>> > have traced it down to two distinct problems:
> 
> <snip>
> 
>> > Secondly, XGetFontPath returns the string "unix:/7100" in
>> > font_init_freetype() which is the XFS 'path'. It appears 
>> that the current
>> > code is unable to find any fonts on this path and as a 
>> result there are
>> > NULL pointers all over the place which eventually get 
>> referenced when
>> > font_getfont_with_style gets called. I looked at a couple of other
>> > programs which used Freetype and couldn't find a consistent 
>> method for
>> > determining the path to the fonts (some seem to hard code 
>> it as a last
>> > resort).
>> 
>> Unopenable font paths are not a problem, they are simply skipped.  The
>> problem appears if there are no local fonts.  Are you getting all your
>> fonts from a server?
> 
> It appears that all fonts are obtained from the font server (which is the
> same machine). The only path returned from XGetFontPath is "unix:/7100".
> Locally there are heaps of fonts installed and the X font server is aware
> of all of them - does X need to know about them as well (using xset
> +fp=<path> for instance)??

Yes, you will need to tell X about them.  To do freetype, we need to get
the actual font files, not just what X font servers give us.  You should
add lines to your /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 to look something like this:

Section "Files"
        FontPath        "unix/:7100"                    # local font server
        # if the local font server has problems, we can fall back on these
        FontPath        "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/misc"
        FontPath        "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/cyrillic"
        FontPath        "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi/:unscaled"
        FontPath        "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/:unscaled"
        FontPath        "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/Type1"
        FontPath        "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/Speedo"
        FontPath        "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi"
        FontPath        "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi"
EndSection

(modified for you being on RedHat of course.)  Yes, I know it sucks that we
can't use the X font server stuff, but it just doesn't give enough info.

> I looked a tiny bit at Pango but couldn't find how it obtains it's font
> paths as this would be good to copy. Some programs are already using
> Pango, but it may be too bleeding edge.

We will eventually move to Pango.  Not yet, though.

> Any other ideas? If I get time I'll look into the message_error problem
> further.

That would be rather interesting.  Can you get any message_* to show?

-Lars

-- 
Lars Clausen (http://shasta.cs.uiuc.edu/~lrclause)| Hårdgrim of Numenor
"I do not agree with a word that you say, but I   |----------------------------
will defend to the death your right to say it."   | Where are we going, and
    --Evelyn Beatrice Hall paraphrasing Voltaire  | what's with the handbasket?