I have been chasing my tail on this, would appreciate comments or a pointer to an existing description.
I recently upgrade from 11.3 to 11.4, KDE 4.6.1
I have /home on a separate partition and it was unchanged in the upgrade.
If I open Personal Settings-Application Appearance-Fonts, one of my font choices is Adobe Helvetica.
If I open Gimp, open a new file, I can select Adobe Helvetica as a font and insert text in my new file
If I open Inkscape (svg drawing application), I can select Adobe Helvetica as a font, text is inserted but when I reselect it for editing, the window indicates that the font is just Sans. (Inkscape has some font selection wierdness, but keep reading)
If I open LibreOffice, Adobe Helvetica is NOT on the font list for selection.
If I run
fc-list |grep Adobe
Adobe Courier:style=Bold
Adobe Utopia:style=Italic
Adobe Times:style=Bold
Adobe Helvetica:style=Bold Oblique
Adobe New Century Schoolbook:style=Bold Italic
Adobe Utopia:style=Bold
Adobe Utopia:style=Regular
Adobe Helvetica:style=Oblique
Adobe Courier:style=Oblique
Adobe New Century Schoolbook:style=Italic
Adobe New Century Schoolbook:style=Bold
Adobe Utopia:style=Bold Italic
Adobe Times:style=Regular
Adobe Times:style=Bold Italic
Adobe Times:style=Italic
Adobe Helvetica:style=Bold
Adobe Helvetica:style=Regular
Adobe New Century Schoolbook:style=Regular
Adobe Courier:style=Regular
Adobe Courier:style=Bold Oblique
However, I cannot find any files named Adobe Helvetica or Helvetica in /usr/share/fonts/* and I am not really sure it is installed.
My suspicion is that the upgrade process preserving /home has the system looking at some old information, and that gimp and Inkscape are doing font replacement, while LibreOffice is doing it’s own thing.
What is the best procedure to refresh the system info on what fonts really are loaded?
I had already tried “SuSEconfig --module fonts”, it runs but Adobe Helvetica remains on the system font list.
((Note that I have several Adobe xx fonts listed, but not reaaly on the system, Adobe Helvetica is just an example here))
I also renamed /home/user/.fontconfig.
A new, smaller .fontconfig was rebuilt, but no change to the general issue of non-existent fonts being listed.
On 2011-04-17 15:36, cmcgrath5035 wrote:
>
> Thanks, Carlos.
>
> I had already tried “SuSEconfig --module fonts”, it runs but Adobe
> Helvetica remains on the system font list.
> ((Note that I have several Adobe xx fonts listed, but not reaaly on the
> system, Adobe Helvetica is just an example here))
>
> I also renamed /home/-user-/.fontconfig.
> A new, smaller .fontconfig was rebuilt, but no change to the general
> issue of non-existent fonts being listed.
Sorry then, I’m no expert in that field
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” at Telcontar)
I have a clean 11.4 install and I have the same output of fc-list.
I’d suspect all the adobe fonts are automatically installed as an alias
to installed fonts, as a compatibility thing - so that documents
specifying it open properly.
Unless the fonts aren’t actually working, I wouldn’t worry about it.
I did notice that several of the cache files in /var/cache/fontconfig had dates that went back to the date I upgraded (11.3 to 11.4), so I renamed the directory, reran SuSEconfig. A new /var/cache/fontconfig directory was created, its contents look to be same but are now all dated today.
The system still offers up Adobe Helvetica as an installed system font, but it is not really there.
So I’ll give up for now. I now know how to recognize when a font acts flaky what to look for, and will just remain curious as to what is going on here.
cmcgrath5035 wrote:
>
> I read thru this link: ‘Chapter 14. Installing and Configuring Fonts for
> the Graphical User Interface’ (http://tinyurl.com/4y2dmfp) , looked at
> most of the config fies it referenced and found nothing of particular
> interest
>
> I did notice that several of the cache files in /var/cache/fontconfig
> had dates that went back to the date I upgraded (11.3 to 11.4), so I
> renamed the directory, reran SuSEconfig. A new /var/cache/fontconfig
> directory was created, its contents look to be same but are now all
> dated today.
>
> The system still offers up Adobe Helvetica as an installed system font,
> but it is not really there.
>
> So I’ll give up for now. I now know how to recognize when a font acts
> flaky what to look for, and will just remain curious as to what is going
> on here.
>
>
What is happening is fontconfig and its configuration creates aliases of
these Adobe font names to ensure documents open with a reasonable
matching font face, so Helvetica maps to Sans and the default Sans is
actually a dejavu, Arial or other common Sans which is installed as a
real font. There are similar mappings for Times, hence Serif, hence
Dejavu Serif.
If you want to know in detail about the font installed, their real names
and included glyphs, you can install fontmatrix. It is in the KDE:Extras
repo as well as in my home repo. It does not require KDE, only Qt4.
