Installing Type1 fonts for Gnome-Print

Update: 6 Aug 2001 The Gnome-Print font installation process is rather broken. I'm not maintainer of the project any more. If the suggestions on this page don't work, I don't have a solution, sorry. I'd be happy to link to other resources, so let me know if you find any.

Raph Levien <raph@acm.org>
7 Jul 1999

Note: the font installation process is proving to be a lot trickier than we thought. A new Gnome-Print package, expected soon, should have some of these wrinkles worked out.

Installing fonts for Gnome-Print is a bit trickier than it should be. Most applications that print require at least the basic fonts of Helvetica, Times, and Courier to be installed. If the gnome-print install did not find these fonts, this guide should help you install them.

First, make sure that you have the font files. You'll need either Adobe or URW fonts containing the .pfb files (glyph shape data). Fortunately, URW fonts are freely available, for example as urw-fonts.tar.gz from www.gimp.org. The URW fonts are also available in the RedHat 6.0 RPM named urw-fonts.

Then, go to the gnome-print build directory (I'm assuming you built out of cvs), and run this command:

./gnome-font-install --system --scan --no-copy --afm-path=/usr/local/share/fonts/afms --pfb-assignment=ghostscript,<path> fonts/

where <path> is substituted with your actual path to the .pfb files, for example /usr/share/ghostscript/fonts. Also, /usr/local/share should be your preferred data directory (gnome-print should have already installed the relevant .afm files in the fonts/afms subdir).

Try printing a test page with testprint.

Hopefully, these font installation problems will largely become moot when we start providing font packages that include the GnomePrint installation magic inside them.

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