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After some research, I've discovered some things
about fonts, gimp, and linux. (Some of this may be old news to many of you, but
it was new to me because I'm not a font expert.) On RH8.0 (and probably other
dist's as well) there are 3 font handlers. The first is the traditional X font
server "xfs" or "xfstt" on some systems. The other two font handlers are Xft and
the new Xft2. Xfs gets it's configuration from the familiar /etc/X11/XF86Config
file and from /etc/X11/fs/config. Nothing new here. The Xft font handler uses
/etc/X11/XftConfig for it's config (it may also be in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11 as
well). But the newest version of Xft called Xft2 uses a pair of new config files
which live in /etc/fonts called "fonts.conf" and "fonts.dtd".
It seems that Gnome now uses Xft2 for it's fonts
because when I added the directories to the new config file, then ran "fc-cache"
in the font directory, the new fonts suddenly became available to Gnome
applications with the exception of Gimp. I also added the new font
directories to the older XftConfig file so that they would be available to any
app using Xft. Gimp now sees the fonts, but only about a third of them look
right. The other two-thirds seem to be using a default font in place of the
actual selected font. So for example, if I chose one of the microsoft fonts, I
get the default "sans" font instead.
This situtation kinda sucks because I have a lot of
nice looking fonts which are useless under 1.3.10, but work perfectly under
1.2.3. I'm not sure why the font hadlers have become so fragmented under
X/Gnome/Gimp, but it would be nice if there was some way to regain the use of
the font libraries which worked under earlier versions of
Gimp.
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