international fonts and character encodings

[James Richard Tyrer]

Basil Fowler wrote:
> James,
> 
> One of the gotchas with truetype fonts is that a special program has to
> be used to generate fonts.dir.  It is 'mkttfdir'.

Actually, the new version: >= 4.3.0 of XFree86 contains new:  "mkfontscale"
  & "mkfontdir" that are *supposed* to handle TrueType fonts.  As I implied,
there might be a problem with them that is the cause of this.  I also find
that I do not have an encoding for "8859-6" and that might also be a problem.

> Once this is done, the resulting 'fonts.dir' has to be copied to
> 'fonts.scale' in the same directory.

I always preferred to run have "mkttfdir" produce the: "fonts.scale" and 
then run: "mkfontdir" to make the: "fonts.dir".

So, I removed "fonts.scale" & "fonts.dir" and opened the directory with the 
KDE Font Installer (su mode) and it produced a: "fonts.dir" that does 
include the "8859-6" entries.  Go figure. :-|

> The older Red Hat distros had an excellent init script kept in 
> /etc/rc.d/init.d that automatically updated all font directories on
> startup if needed.

It would be nice if KDE used the KDE Font Installer to do that when KDE 
started up rather than the broken code in the: "startkde" script.  However, 
for the system level fonts, it would have to be KDM that called it since it 
would have to be run as root.
> 
> You produced a whole load of fonts encoded 10646-1.  My guess for Arabic
> - and other languages using the Arabic alphabet - would be that the
> encoding should be 10646-6. But perhaps others could check this out.

No, there is just one UniCode.  The "-1" is just there to conform to the 
format of the XLFD lines.

--
JRT
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