Hello,
I just recently did an installation of Feisty on an Athlon box. The fact that it's an Ubuntu install is sort of peripheral to the topic, though; I'm asking the question on the Debian X forum because I know that Ubuntu uses the Debian mechanism for fonts management. I've used lots of different distros since about 1996, and they all still seem to suffer from some of the same "discombobulation" on the fonts front: access to fonts is *NOT* unified. Different applications and administration utilities do not present the same fonts. As an example, I found the list of "300+ Free Fonts for Ubuntu" and decided to try installing a few of them. The first font I installed was the Gentium font:
sudo apt-get install ttf-gentium
This worked perfectly. The font shows up in the Gnome Font Browser, it's available in the font selectors in gedit, OpenOffice, firefox, and even gnome terminal.
I then installed the "Dustimo" fonts:
sudo apt-get install ttf-dustin
These did *not* work perfectly. You can find all of the .ttf files in the normal directory structure, the were properly cached with fc-cache, etc., but they do *not* show up in the Gnome Font Browser, or firefox, or the gnome terminal -- but they *do* show up in both gedit and OpenOffice. WTH? Can anyone suggest *why* this could be the case? How is the Gnome Font Manager determining what to display when you go to "font:///"? Is it not using the cache information being maintained by defoma? Same for firefox!
Again, I've seen this sort of thing on every distro I've ever used. The access to the fonts just doesn't seem to be consistent across the platform and all applications on it. Why has this issue never been dealt with? What are the technical obstacles preventing it from happening? Is there a workaround or global script/command I can run to get things "synced up"? Any help would be greatly appreciated. A pointer to some sort of FAQ or tutorial would be great, especially since I haven't been able to find one after a *lot* of googling.
best,
Jim
Linux