To Arjen and Phil: > -----Original Message----- > From: "Arjen Markus" <arjen.mar...@deltares.nl> > Sent: 05/11/2014 07:26 > To: "Alan W. Irwin" <ir...@beluga.phys.uvic.ca>; "phil rosenberg" > <philip_rosenb...@yahoo.com> > Cc: "PLplot development list" <Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net> > Subject: RE: [Plplot-devel] Docbook on Cygwin > > Hi Alan, Phil, >
> I will try to reproduce Phil’s results on Cygwin. I had never looked at the management of fonts under Cygwin, but from a first glance at the files I found that are related to fonts (searching for “font*.*”), there is a lot of infrastructure. Also some user documentation, fontconfig-user.pdf, that might come in handy when we have to decide how to deal with the fonts. Phil’s instructions should come in handy too. @Arjen: As I recall, font-config allows individual users to specify font locations. So that fontconfig-user.pdf file may well give you the required clean solution to this mess. @Both: However, note as background information that I got a response from an xelatex developer I contacted last year, that indicated TeX doesn't use fontconfig directly at all! That is such a no-brainer, I am sure they will fix that oversight soon if they haven't done so already since that fix would then allow TeX packages such as the unicode-aware xelatex to easily specify unicode fonts in a generic way (sans, sans-serif, and monotype) which would then allow fontconfig to deliver the best system glyph for use by xelatex for every unicode case Without this fix, xelatex can only use just a handful of pre-specified (in the docbook configured file) fonts specified by file name (!) I chose Sans.ttf, Serif.ttf, and Mono.ttf because of their wide unicode coverage (but still not nearly the wide access that would be given by fontconfig to system fonts). See further remarks concerning this issue in doc/docbook/README.developers. Note, if xelatex isn't using fontconfig directly it doesn't imply the above possible solution won't work since likely TeX is combined with other font-using software on Cygwin that does use fontconfig to find system fonts. Anyhow, by all means try the solution above to see if it works! Off topic but still important for making our conversations by e-mail concerning PLplot much easier to understand because I found the above quote from Arjen way at the bottom of Phil's e-mail, but not right at the bottom because Arjen replied to me in top-posting style as well. So this is quite frustrating. I know that both of you have a strong habit of top posting which you would both find it difficult to break, but if you don't mind would you make a concious effort to fight that habit by interspersing your responses on PLplot lists in conversational order paragraph by paragraph (exactly like I do above and below) or even sentence by sentence so there is a more natural flow to our conversations concerning various PLplot topics? The result should be your remarks interspersed with the paragraphs (or even sentences) of the post you are referring to, with some sort of mark such as a leading ">" as above and below to indicate what is quoted from a previous post. <IMPORTANT> delete the irrelevant portions of the paragraphs you are responding to if all or part of the topic covered in that paragraph has been completed. And you are positively encouraged to edit each paragraph you are responding to by, e.g., simply taking its topic sentence and adding a bit of explanation so long as your additions are within [ ] delimiters and your subtractions are indicated by something like [...]. This mode of answering list mail tends to make each successive post in a conversational interchange shorter and shorter until they are no topics left to be discussed. And this mode also makes the conversation easier to follow because it all appears in natural conversational order. Another big advantage of conversational mode is it reminds you quite strongly (whenever you see a question mark in an individual paragraph or sentence that you are responding to) that there are one or more questions that require an answer. If you top-post instead, all the remarks you are responding to end up in arbitrary order at the bottom (especially if there is a mixture of top posting and conversational posting styles like now on the plplot mailing lists), and since you are no longer responding paragraph by paragraph, you do often miss direct questions from, e.g., me that I need answers to. So the direct result of the top-posting mode is it often takes two or more rounds to get answers to questions, which can introduce huge and quite frustrating delays because of our different time zones. Therefore, I really would appreciate you both trying to post using conversational style rather than top posting even though it will probably feel completely unnatural to start. But once you get used to using conversational mode, I don't think you will ever top-post again because it just destroys the conversation and leads to very long e-mails with many relevants bits lost at the bottom amongst many more irrelevant bits. And the scatter of bits of posts is even worse when there are interchanges between conversational mode posters like me and top-posting mode posters like you currently are. Anyhow, I hope this is going to be one of those "enough said" situations that you can apply to all PLplot mailing lists you post to (and also all your off-list e-mail with me) and now back on topic.... @Phil: I have now read your remark in doc/docbook/README.developers "Then download the gnu FreeFont fonts (they can currently be found at http://www.fontspace.com/gnu-freefont) and add them to the /usr/share/fonts/OTF directory." Could you be more specific (to this list, not to this file yet) about exactly what file names you downloaded and put into that directory? I followed up on that URL (probably not the best source for such data since it is a secondary source that copied fonts from the primary source which is the savannah gnu-freefont project), and it appears the font files are organized as a zip file at this secondary source of fonts. Did you unpack the entire contents of that zip file into /usr/share/fonts/OTF or just some subset such as, e.g, *.otf files? Or did that zip file contain *.otf files (or *.ttf files) exclusively? I would really appreciate immediate answers to these question (note off-topic remark above about missed questions for the top post style) because I really don't think you should need the download. After all, if you use the GUI search engine at <http://cygwin.com/cgi-bin2/package-grep.cgi> to find, e.g., FreeSans.ttf it points you to the texlive-collection-fontsextra package (and only that package meaning there is no other source for FreeSans.ttf, unlike Debian packaging using symlinks)), and if you look at the list of the file contents of that package (available from the same site) it shows the files usr/share/texmf-dist/fonts/truetype/public/gnu-freefont/FreeSans.ttf usr/share/texmf-dist/fonts/opentype/public/gnu-freefont/FreeSans.otf as files and not (dangling) symlinks. So assuming you find out those files are also in that location on your system after the install of texlive-collection-fontsextra, I strongly suspect you do not need an additional download step as currently described in doc/docbook/README.developers. Instead (assuming you start with a fresh Cygwin install or can somehow reproduce the exact situation before you wrote files into /usr/share/fonts/OTF), all you should have to do for FreeSans is copy either or both (whichever is needed) the above files into /usr/share/fonts/OTF and similarly for FreeSerif and FreeMono. Could you confirm that simpler (at least in concept) workaround works? If so, that would prove the relevant of the two files mentioned above are valid font files that can be understood by our doc building software? If not, then that proves the above files have somehow been clobberred in the Cygwin package in which case a workarond might be to overwrite them with known good fonts files that you have downloaded, then reinstall texlive-collection-fontsextra to discover whether that is all that is needed to get those fonts to work properly (for an unmolested /usr/share/fonts/OTF). However, the most likely scenario is the packaged font files are good (i.e., the simpler workaround works), in which case I suggest you attempt to simplify that workaround even further, e.g., by installing texlive-collection-fontsextra twice after a fresh Cygwin install. That package (if anything like the corresponding Linux package) should include scripts that are run after the added fonts are installed. But the packagers could have screwed up the packages so those index updates are done before the actual file install of the above two font files (and equivalent results for FreeSerif and FreeMono), and in that case those fonts won't work until they have been properly indexed by _the second_ installation of texlive-collection-fontsextra. On 2014-11-05 09:30-0000 Phil Rosenberg wrote: > Hi Alan and Arjen > Yes I must confess to not liking the idea of copying fonts around either. Especially to the /usr/share folder. Yep, if that has to be done (see remarks above) then the texlive-collection-fontsextra package should do it, and not you. > It feels like if anything they should go in /usr/local/share. Definitely agreed for user-copied fonts that are not officially installed. > but I tried this and it did not work. Something else to bring up on the Cygwin list although it appears to me that fontconfig would give you the alternative of trying this, if the even better alternative of configuring fontconfig to use the usr/share/texmf-dist/fonts/opentype/public/gnu-freefont directory did not exist. There are a number of font packages (the Cygwin X faq says they all begin font-) but I couldn't find one for freefonts. [...] That conclusion is consistent with what I discovered from the Cygwin package finding GUI I mentioned above. I mentioned before there might be a way to configure Cygwin to honor fonts that are located in /usr/share/texmf-dist/fonts/opentype/public/gnu-freefont so once you are satisfied by the above experiments that the content of usr/share/texmf-dist/fonts/truetype/public/gnu-freefont/FreeSans.ttf and/or usr/share/texmf-dist/fonts/opentype/public/gnu-freefont/FreeSans.otf is fine, and it is only the location that sucks, I would immediately move (as I suggested above) to using fontconfig to configure /usr/share/texmf-dist/fonts/opentype/public/gnu-freefont as a valid location for fonts. (Or probably /usr/share/texmf-dist/fonts would be better as the configured location since you might run into this issue for other fonts required by ordinary latex..) @Both: the above experiments are worth doing because they should all be quick. But ultimately there may be no smooth solution to this issue. In which case, I suspect one or both of you are going to have to ask about fonts on the Cygwin list to clear up what the issue is. And that "kills two birds with one stone" as I recall Cygwin veterans view that list as THE Cygwin bugtracker so once you report the experiments to that list you may get a very quick fix for the issue by those who are packaging texlive-collection-fontsextra and that fix should make life much easier for you and Phil. > Presumably, however there must (or should) be way to install and use any font? How is it done on Linux - if you have a ttf or otf file, how can you install it? @Phil: this is a really good question which I believe I have now answered (commit 50cd4af) in README.developers. So please take a look at that new version, and let me know what you think. Alan __________________________ Alan W. Irwin Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca). Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net). __________________________ Linux-powered Science __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
