gsfonts-x11 for Debian
======================

This packages makes the 35 Postscript fonts from the gsfonts package
available to your X server under their "urw" names and via fonts.alias
with the official "adobe" names, too.

This package does not contain any fonts itself but allows to reuse the
ghostscript fonts as X11 screen fonts.

It may be a good idea to use these fonts under X11 because many
drawing programs (xfig, sketch, gimp, ...) need high quality fonts,
especially the 35 "standard" Postscript fonts, which are used by
Postscript printers and Ghostscript.

If you have the original Adobe fonts available for X11, I suggest to
place them somewhere under /usr/local/share/fonts and add this
directory to the font path before /usr/share/fonts/X11/Type1, so the
Adobe fonts have priority over the ghostscript fonts while the latter
can be used as a fallback, if some Adobe font is missing.  You can
change your font path by editing the xorg.conf(5x) file or by using
xset(1x).  "xset q" displays the current font path configuration
(among others).

You need the line
  Load "type1"
in your xorg.conf(5x) file in Section "Module", otherwise the X
server cannot handle the postscript fonts.


Font path order
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

If you notice problems with ugly small screen fonts (especially
adobe-helvetica, adobe-courier and adobe-times) after installing
gsfonts-x11, have a look at the order of your font path entries.
I suggest the following entries in xorg.conf:

Section "Files"
        FontPath        "/usr/share/fonts/X11/misc"
        FontPath        "/usr/share/fonts/X11/cyrillic"
        FontPath        "/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi/:unscaled"
        FontPath        "/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi/:unscaled"
        FontPath        "/usr/share/fonts/X11/Type1"
        FontPath        "/var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d/dirs/TrueType"
        FontPath        "/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi"
        FontPath        "/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi"
EndSection

With this font path the Adobe fonts are mentioned multiple times:
1) /usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi/:unscaled, /usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi/:unscaled
   These contain the bitmap fonts from xfonts-75dpi(-transcoded) and
   xfonts-100dpi(-transcoded) which contain bitmap Adobe fonts, which
   are optimized for some screen resolutions.  The ":unscaled" option
   tells the X server to use them only in their original size without
   scaling them, which makes them ugly, because the pixels are scaled.
2) /usr/share/fonts/X11/Type1
   This contains the postscript vector fonts from gsfonts-x11.  If no
   optimized bitmap font was available above, this uses vector fonts
   which are scalable and look good especially in big sizes.
3) /usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi/, /usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi
   These again contain the bitmap fonts but this time the fonts can be
   scaled.  This is a last resort fallback, if no scalable font was
   available in the Type1 directory.

It isn't a good idea to use 100dpi/75dpi without the ":unscaled" tag
before including Type1 in the font path, because this implies that the
X server always tries to scale the bitmap fonts to large sizes instead
of using the vector fonts, which look much better for large font
sizes.

It also isn't a good idea to place the Type1 entry at the head of the
font path, because the vector fonts aren't optimized or hinted for
small font sizes, where the unscaled pixel fonts from 100dpi or 75dpi
are preferable.


Roland Rosenfeld <roland@debian.org>
