AIX

We have an app that prints PDF files but some of the required TrueType fonts are missing on our AIX box. Does AIX support TrueType fonts? How can I install the following fonts?:

Code:

OCR A Extended (OCRAEXT.TTF)
Courier New (cour.ttf)

I have tried copying those fonts from my Windows box into /usr/lpp/X11/defaults/TrueType but I don't think that was the right way to do it and it didn't work anyway. I tried searching for filesets that contained these fonts but I wasn't able to find anything going down that route either.

Maybe I have to use "smitty font"? But where would I get a "*.nsf" font file?

As i feel there is a bit of misunderstanding of the concepts involved first a few general explanations.

To be precise AIX doesn't "support fonts" at all - X-Windows is supporting the fonts. X-Windows is provided with AIX so the difference isn't all too obvious, but in fact X-Windows is (in one respect) a generic way of handling all things graphical, including fonts.

Any X-Windows system consists of several parts, which might be networked:

1) an X-server. This is the part which handles the graphical display. Think of it as a driver for a graphic card with a network interface and a standardised protocol (the X-protocol, default port 6000tcp) to use its services.

2) a window manager. This is the part which uses one (or several) X-servers to create a display. It decorates windows with borders and a title bar (along with the functionality built into these elements, like resizing, closing, etc.), handles change of focus between windows, etc.. An example for sucha a window manager would be mwm (Motif Window Manager), which is supplied with AIX, another would be fvwm (an open source development), Enlightenment and many, many more. Desktop environments like KDE and Gnome are basically window managers with a lot of additional functions.

3) the font manager. It renders all the fonts the various devices (displays, printers, ...) will use and provides them over the network (default port 7100tcp) to the X-server(s).


Right. First, there are some standard formats for X-fonts, the most common being "PCF" (portable compiled format). Most font servers are designed to handle these formats, but not TrueType, which is a Microsoft-only font format (actually a pretty crude one and the M$$-fonts are dumbed-down and uglyfied Adobe-fonts, but that only as an aside). There are font-servers which can handle Truetype-fonts, though, and you have to make sure you are using one which can do that.

Second, you need not only to copy the font file but also make the font server aware of it. Here is the process described. You should then be able to view the font using the "xfontsel" utility. You can also add alias names for the fonts using the "fonts.alias" file (see the manpage or the AIX documentation for a detailed explanation of the file format).

I hope this helps.

bakunin

Which font-server can handle Truetype-fonts that is compatible with AIX?
If I have the font in a "*.bff" or "*.pcf.Z" format, then I don't need a new font-server?
Is there any process for converting *.ttf files into *.pcf.Z?

I entered "truetype fonts aix" into google and got this as third hit.

correct.

With a font server using TrueType-fonts why would you want to do this?

bakunin

FYI, IBM has no interest in helping people setup font servers. Especially if you are trying to use fonts that did not come from IBM. Since the font server route was not working out, I ended up going down the "convert ttf to pcf.Z" files route. Since AIX has no chance of doing this conversion in anyway that I have found, I turned to an Ubuntu box and figured it out.

First, on the Ubuntu box, you need to download the source code of freetype1_1.4pre.cvs20060210.tar.gz. After extracting it, you need to get "ttf2bdf" compiled. It requires a library file that, I believe, is also included in the package named "libttf".

Once ttf2bdf has been compiled, go to X11 & TrueType fonts and download the "iso*" files provided and the TTFall script to the same directory your compiled ttf2bdf file still on the Ubuntu box. Update the TTFall script by changing the following:

Code:

DIR=`pwd`
MAPS=./
FONTS=$DIR/ocraext.tff

Execute ./TTFall and you will get some ocr*pcf.gz files. Copy these to your AIX box and "gunzip *pcf.gz". Then, since AIX likes them in "pcf.Z" format, run "compress *pcf" and you will have them. Copy these files to where you need them, like $JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/fonts. "cd" to the same directory and run "mkfontdir" and check the fonts.dir file for the new "ocr a" entries.

This process worked for the OCR A fonts, but not for the Courier New fonts. I'll have to figure something else out for the Courier New.