Font Questions

Jeff Waugh jeff.waugh at canonical.com
Mon Nov 1 10:28:58 UTC 2004


On Mon, 2004-11-01 at 05:06 -0500, volvoguy wrote:
> Howdy all! I may need to ask this on the users list, but since it's
> not a technical issue I thought I'd try here first.

As it's a usage issue, so it should be on -users. I've replied there.

> I'm trying to deal with fonts - installing them, previewing them, and
> perhaps even editing them. I know with other distros, you could
> double-click on a font file and you'd get a little sample window
> (similar to Windows). The "icon preview" feature is better than
> nothing, but it doesn't seem to work on remote files (Samba mounted),
> which is where I keep my thousands of fonts until I need one.
> 
> Except for the font dialog in "Desktop Preferences", Ubuntu doesn't
> seem to provide any font related tools/options.

It does. You can open fonts in a preview window (although I think there
may be a bug here - it's erroring atm for me), you can drag'n'drop fonts
to install them, etc.

> The next question is about the best place to put (install) TTF files.
> Can fonts installed in my home folder (or .fonts actually) be used
> system-wide? I don't actually have a .fonts folder, so that kinda
> threw me off a bit. Do you need to run a program/script to make the
> system aware of new fonts?

1. Computer > Desktop Preferences > Font
2. Click on "Details..."
3. Click on "Go to font folder"

OR

1. Type "gnome-open fonts:///" at the command line and press enter

OR

1. Ctrl-L in a Nautilus window
2. Type in "fonts:///" and press enter

You can drag'n'drop fonts here (they end up in your ~/.fonts/ directory)
and see all the system fonts too.

I want to make this location more obvious. Perhaps putting it on the
first level 'Fonts' preferences dialogue would be a start. Anyway, this
kind of stuff is best done upstream, given that we're right in the thick
of the GNOME development process too. (Adding another icon in Desktop
Preferences would be crap.)

- Jeff

-- 
Ooh, ooh, ooh!             http://www.ubuntulinux.org/           Ubuntu!




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