[kde-linux] Making fonts available to Konsole 3.5.10

[Duncan]

David J Iannucci posted on Sat, 22 Oct 2011 07:19:31 -1000 as excerpted:

> But when I open the Select Font dialog for Konsole, they don't appear.
> In fact many of the fonts that appear in OOo are not included.

I see you already got the monospace font answer for konsole, but here's a 
three additional hints you may find useful, tho the second may or may not 
be practical and is mostly speculation/assumption on my part as I've 
never actually looked into it, and the third... well, when/if you get 
ready to upgrade to kde4.  YMMV.

1) While konsole is indeed limited to monospace fonts, for kde in general 
(v3 or v4), the trick you mentioned (dropping new fonts in ~/.fonts, or 
the system variant, /usr/share/fonts/) should work.  They should then 
appear in kcontrol's fonts kcm, and for instance in the font settings for 
konqueror, dolphin, etc.

As an alternative to dropping them in manually, you can use kde's font-
installer.  I can see it as a kcm (under system administration) in kde 
4.7.2 here, and recall it being in 3.x as well but of course can't 
confirm where it might have been in 3.x.

2) I believe that true-type fonts have a bitmapped characteristics set 
that describes things like monospace, particularly since I've seen 
occasional monospace fonts missing from the konsole chooser and 
proportional fonts listed, when I know konsole should only take monospace, 
indicating it's not actually checking individual spacing, just listing 
everything that says it's monospace.  If that's true and I highly suspect 
it is, a good ttf editor should let you modify the font characteristic 
bitmap including the monospace characteristic bit, or with a bit of 
research into font formats, you should be able to hex-edit/bit-flip the 
appropriate bit manually.

Alternatively, I'm guessing a simple bit of konsole/konsole-part source 
editing should get it to list all fonts, not just monospace fonts.

Either way, if you're suitably determined to use a particular font, 
regardless (maybe it's almost all monospace, at least in the ascii set, 
but it's a UTF-8 font and some of the exotics aren't monospaced, so the 
bit wasn't set, or maybe it's a monospace font but the bit never got set 
for some reason), or if you just want to experiment, it should be 
relatively easy to change either individual fonts or the konsole code so 
it'll let you do so.

But of course the results aren't likely to be particularly practical if 
you use a radically proportional font, for sure, given the monospace 
assumption konsole makes and its implications for display.

3) Given that you are on Gentoo as I am, FWIW from personal experience, 
if/when you DO decide to go kde4, I strongly recommend USE=-semantic-
desktop, as the performance difference when I finally turned it off here 
was quite surprising indeed, even tho I had as much of it as I could 
already deactivated.  That does mean that you won't be able to use 
anything kdepim based (so no kmail, for instance, the reason I had 
semantic-desktop on here, until I got fed up with kmail akonadification 
and switched to claws-mail, which I'm *MUCH* happier with than akonadified 
kmail2, and even mildly happier with than I was kmail), since kdepim 
means akonadi, which forces USE=semantic-desktop for kdelibs, which in 
turn forces it for pretty much everything else, due to
[semantic-desktop=] dependencies.  So if you're on kmail (or akregator or 
knode or the IM client, I forgot the name) now, you'll need to switch to 
something else, but as I said, I'm actually happier with the gtk-baseed 
claws-mail than I was with kmail even before it akonadified (and I 
replaced akregator with claws-mail using its feed-plugin, as well), and 
you might wish to do that well ahead of any eventual kde4 upgrade so it's 
one thing at a time instead of all at once, but it *IS* well worth it.

FWIW, the difference turning off USE=semantic-desktop for kde4 made here 
was amazing.  It felt like I just upgraded CPUs by a couple cores (on a 4-
core system, or boosted the clockspeed by half a gigahertz.  I can 
honestly say, I'm now about as happy with kde4 as I ever was with kde3, 
and that's the first time I've been able to say that.  Ironically, given 
the bullet-point feature all this semantic-desktop junk is made out to be 
for kde4, my chances of sticking with kde permanently, or at least as 
long as the semantic-desktop stuff remains compile-time optional, just 
shot up to heights not seen since the kde3 era!

And that's even tho I had both strigi and nepomuk disabled when I was 
forced to have them installed, because I was using kmail and kaddressbook, 
and kaddress book required akonadi starting with kde 4.4, and akonadi 
required USE=semantic-desktop.  Keeping in mind that run-time disabling 
is about all the choice binary distributions are likely to give a person, 
and the performance difference I saw between that and actually compiling 
without semantic-desktop or its dependencies at all, this is a choice the 
vast majority of kde users are unfortunately not likely to ever get.  Oh, 
well...

But, with any luck, the trinity project can continue to keep the former 
kde3 working, and continue to update it to run on modern Linux 
(completing their port to qt4, for instance), and if you want to continue 
running it, you'll never have to consider kde4, kde5, etc, unless you 
want to. =:^)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman