PostScript Font Installation

I'll refer to this as a "PostScript installation" because it tells ApplixWare to use the PostScript Type 1 font files a bit more directly than does the FontTastic installation. I use this name despite the fact that much of what I describe here also applies to TrueType fonts installed with the help of a TrueType font server such as xfsft. This method is more of a pain than the FontTastic method, and it has its own problems, but it also has its advantages. Note that this involves editing (at least) three files with similar names in different directories: fonts.dir, fontmap.dir, and Fontmap. I describe what each is, but be sure to keep them straight. To do this type of installation, do the following:

  1. Copy the font files to some directory on your hard disk. I've used /usr/local/fonts, and refer to this directory below. Adjust accordingly if you use some other location. You'll need both the .afm and .pfb files (.pfa files might also work in place of .pfb files, but I'm not sure of that).
  2. Create a fonts.dir file describing the fonts you've just added. The first line of this file contains a single number with the number of fonts it describes, and each subsequent line starts with a font filename (for a .pfb file, in the case of Type 1 fonts), then a space, and then an X font descriptor. An example entry is given below. I gather that you normally create a fonts.dir file by creating a fonts.scale file and then running a utility. If the directory contains only scaleable fonts (like Type 1 fonts), my understanding is that these files will be identical.
  3. Add the /usr/local/fonts directory to your X server's font path. In XFree86, this is done by editing the /etc/X11/XF86Config file. There are a series of lines in this file that start with "FontPath", each of which has a pathname. Just add another line like the others pointing to /usr/local/fonts. In Metro-X, there's a single comma-separated font path line in the /etc/X11/Xconfig file. I assume there's something similar for Accelerated-X.
  4. Restart your X server to let the new font path take effect. You might want to check that this part has come off correctly by using xfontsel to look for the new fonts and be sure they're present.
  5. Edit the applix/axdata/fontmetrics/fontmap.dir file. This is the really tedious and tricky part, so be sure to back up your existing fontmap.dir file before proceeding. Basically, you need to create one entry for each font. The entry consists of a "FontRecord" line which gives the name of the font, a "FamilyName" line which gives the name of the font family, a "ScreenName" line which gives the X font name from the fonts.dir file you created in step #2, a "MetricsFile" line which points to the .afm file for the font, a "PostScriptPrintName" line which gives the name by which the font will be called in the PostScript file created by Applix, an (optional) "Type1FontFileName" which points to the font's .pfb file so it can be included in the PostScript file, and (optional) "Slant = 1" and "Weight = 1" lines to flag the font as being italic and/or bold, respectively. Note that Applix is very fussy about the format of these font entries. If a space appears in a name (a filename, a font name, etc.), you must enclose that entry in quotation marks. The comments at the end of the file describe an entry called "EncodingFile", but I'd strongly advise not using this; I've found that including more than a handful of fonts with this line causes Applix Words to become unstable and crash a lot when accessing these fonts. I've got an example entry below. There are additional optional entries for "PostScriptAlternate", "PCLAlternate", and "XAlternate" which may be useful in case the specified font can't be found, but I've not done anything with these. Given my experience with the "EncodingFile" option, I'd suggest not using these until you've thoroughly debugged a new fontmap.dir file.
  6. If you include "Type1FontFileName" entries for the fonts you add, you're then done. If not, you must modify your Ghostscript Fontmap file or install the fonts on your PostScript printer. I don't know how the latter is done, but the former is fairly easy; just copy an existing entry's syntax, being sure to get the filename right and to use the same font name that you used in the "PostScriptPrintName" line of the ApplixWare fontmap.dir file. An example is below. As an alternative to editing the Fontmap file, Ghostscript can be configured to search a path specified by the GS_FONTPATH environment variable for fonts matching a name it sees in a PostScript file; but you won't know what name to use in the fontmap.dir directory without checking each file or using some utility to auto-generate a Fontmap file, so you might as well add the files to Fontmap or use a Type1FontFileName entry.
  7. Test it all. Create a file with all your new fonts (being sure to try bold, italic, and bold-italic variants if you installed them) and try printing it. If Applix complains when you try to use a font, your "MetricsFile" or "ScreenName" line is probably in error. If it complains when you try to print, your "Type1FontFileName" line (if present) may have an incorrect entry. If Applix doesn't complain but you get the wrong font on a printout, it could be that your fontmap.dir PostScriptPrintName doesn't match the entry in your Ghostscript Fontmap file, or perhaps Ghostscript can't find the .pfb file that's specified. This could also be a symptom of a failure to include a PostScriptPrintName entry.

Whether or not to include a Type1FontFileName entry is up to you. If you do include it, that'll make your PostScript files larger, but they'll be more portable (in case you want to create a printout file on one machine and print it elsewhere) -- but distributing the fonts in this form in a PostScript file may violate the copyright on the font, so I don't recommend doing this with any file you might want to make broadly available.

The fonts.dir and Fontmap entries for a set of fonts can be generated automatically by a handy utility called type1inst. (Sorry, I don't recall any more where I found it -- try a web search, or browse a Linux archive site like sunsite.) This certainly does help a lot in adding many fonts. I've found that with some fonts, though, it creates bizarre entries -- for instance, an entry with no font name in the fonts.dir file for a font called Benquad from an Expert Software CD. In fairness to type1inst, I suspect this is because of malformed information in the font itself, though the font works fine when I manually edit the relevant file(s).

As an example of this procedure as a whole, consider the entries I've created for News 701 Italic, a font from a Bitstream CD. First, here's the fonts.dir file entry for this font:

0319a___.pfb -bitstream-news 701-medium-i-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1

Note that the font name ("news 701") includes a space. There's also a fonts.scale file in the same directory with the same information. I'm not an X fonts expert, but I get the impression that X uses the fonts.dir file for display purposes, but fonts.scale is used to generate the fonts.dir file, so that's the one that's important. It wouldn't hurt to create both files, though. My Ghostscript Fontmap entry for this font is also just one line:

/News701BT-ItalicA                       (/usr/local/fonts/0319a___.pfb);

Note that the font name here includes no space, and it doesn't match the font name in the fonts.dir file. This isn't a problem, since it's ApplixWare that has to know both names and put them together correctly -- that's one purpose of the fontmap.dir file. Also, I've included the complete path to the .pfb file for this font. It would be possible to add that path to Ghostscript's GS_LIB environment variable and omit the font path, too, or to install these fonts somewhere that's already on that path.

Now the biggie -- the fontmap.dir entry:

FontRecord = News701-Italic
    Family = "News 701"
    ScreenName = "-bitstream-news 701-medium-i-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1"
    Slant = 1
    MetricsFile = /usr/local/fonts/0319a___.afm
    PostScriptPrintName = News701BT-ItalicA
    Type1FontFileName = /usr/local/fonts/0319a___.pfb

The last line could easily be omitted on my system, since I've got it set up in Ghostscript; I've left it in for illustrative purposes. If you include both a Type1FontFileName line in fontmap.dir and an entry in Fontmap, the Type1FontFileName entry seems to take precedence. Some important points to note about this entry:

Go on to the X-based TrueType install suggestions.
Go back to the Applix fonts main page.

Copyright © 1997, 1998 Rod Smith, rodsmith@rodsbooks.com