font not available as X font after installation

[Erik Devriendt]

Binary package hint: ttf-dejavu

In 8.04LTS the dejavu truetype font becomes avalailable as X font: it shows up in the results of xlsfonts. This means that programs using
basic X windows functions (Xlib, Xt or even Motif) can use the fonts.
However, in 10.04LTS this is not the case anymore.

Why?

[Arne Goetje (arnegoetje)]

On 05/03/2010 08:08 PM, Erik Devriendt wrote:
> Public bug reported:
>
> Binary package hint: ttf-dejavu
>
> In 8.04LTS the dejavu truetype font becomes avalailable as X font: it shows up in the results of xlsfonts. This means that programs using
> basic X windows functions (Xlib, Xt or even Motif) can use the fonts.
> However, in 10.04LTS this is not the case anymore.
>
> Why?

This was handled by defoma before. The font packages installed a hints
file and defoma generated the X information out of it. Recently the
debian font maintainers decided, that they want to drop defoma, since it
is unmaintained. The relevant thread is here [1] and the best place to
raise issues with this decision is this list [2].

[1]
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-fonts-devel/2009-November/003438.html
[2] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-fonts-devel

[Arthur Wiebe (artooro)]

I am affected by the same issue. Installed the t1-xfree86-nonfree package.

Under /usr/share/fonts/type1/t1-xfree86-nonfree I see all the fonts but the fonts.dir and fonts.scale files were not there. So I ran mkfontscale and mkfontdir which created those two files, then ran fc-cache, restarted xfs, dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig, and nothing works.

None of the expected new fonts are listed under xlsfonts and I have no idea what to do from here.

[Paul Garlick (pgarlick)]

I have also found the same problem.

I have just upgraded to maverick 10.10; some of the truetype fonts that were previously available to X windows are no longer available. In particular, I have been using Bitstream Vera Sans, a package that is no longer part of Ubuntu. Its replacement is Dejavu Sans Mono. However, after installation, this is not listed by xlsfonts and cannot be viewed with xfontsel.

To use the Bitsream font with xosview, for example, I previously used the following line in ~/.Xdefaults:

xosview*font: -*-bitstream vera sans-medium-r-normal-*-*-100-*-*-*-*-*-*

There seems to be no equivalent XLFD generated for the Dejavu font.

On searching for information it seems that the packages defoma and x-ttcidfont-conf are involved. In my installation the directory /var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d/dirs/TrueType does not contain any link to the ttf files in /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-dejavu

It would appear that the installation has been partially successful but the defoma-hints process has not been completed. Any ideas?