I have a font dilemma and I was hoping that you could help me out. I am the Technical Lead for display software development for the International Space Station and we are currentlychanging our Operating System from Solaris 2.5 (I know that is old) to Redhat Linux 9.0. The problem is that our software is heavily dependent on the font and the Adobe Helvetica font distributed with Redhat 9.0 is not close enough to the Adobe Helvetica font on Solaris 2.5.
There are multiple versions of the Helvetica fonts on Solaris 2.5. There are the standard bitmaps in pcf format in the 100dpi & 75dpi directories, which should be similar to those you can get from X.org & XFree86.
There are also scalable versions - an F3 version (which lists itself as -linotype-helvetica-...) and a PostScript Type1 version (which claims to be -adobe-helvetica-...). The F3 version would be first in the default font path - but F3 is a dead proprietary format for which there is no support in XFree86. XFree86 should be able to handle the PostScript version, but you won't get the same appearance as XFree86 will use either the Adobe-donated PostScript rasterizer or FreeType to scale the fonts, while Xsun uses the XATM built into Display PostScript, which uses Adobe's very proprietary PostScript font rasterizer to get higher quality output.
(There's also a set of pcf bitmaps in the F3bitmaps directory which correspond to the F3 -linotype-helvetica-...)
Also, what is the legality of using the font from the Solaris package on a Redhat 9.0 distribution?
I think it's a violation of the license agreeement, but I'm no lawyer.
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-Alan Coopersmith- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sun Microsystems, Inc. - Sun Software Group
User Experience Engineering: G11N: X Window System
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