Font Management Questions

Hi all,

Apologies if this is a stupid question.
I have generally been able to muddle through without having to ask any questions, but…

Is there a way to add fonts to increase my choices?

I originally started using R1A4, but after reading so many posts that related to improvements enabled in the nightlies I recently began using those. Every time I install a new nightly it just gets better and better, with one exception (for me) so far. In R1A4 I was able to install new fonts alongside the originals in the system folder, thus allowing me more font choices with some of the software (i.e. WonderBrush). But I just realized recently that with the nightlies I am unable to add fonts to the fonts folder.

I can understand why the developers would want to lock down certain folders in an ever-changing development environment, but why in the world would one want to lock down the fonts folder, especially when that is one of the keys areas the “average user” generally wants to change things. Anecdotal to be sure, but at my age, I’m not all that geeky and everyone that I know (who is equally un-geeky) has had some reason to add fonts on occasion. I tried adding the fonts through the Home folder, but that didn’t work…

Am I stuck with having to reinstall R1A4 alongside the nightly install and bounce my project files back and forth?
Or am I missing something obvious… or maybe not-so-obvious?

Any feedback appreciated… Thanks for your time.

Jayel

Hi
You still can use nightly The solution is quite simple (when you know it :-D)
Some people are working to get font as a prebuild package working (e.g. this is a task for google code in).
But while this is not available you can install them in the unpackaged folder
( i would sugget to installe them in
/home/config/non-packaged/
in the font subfolder.
because then it will be stay there also if you install eg. beta over it (home folder will be mostly untouched)

More infos are available here:
https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/filesystem-layout.html

Add your foints here: /boot/system/non-packaged/data/fonts or /boot/home/config/non-packaged/data/fonts

Thought nobody would ever ask.

http://clasquin-johnson.co.za/michel/haiku/repackaged-apps/fonts/index.html

Enjoy. The league of moveable type collection is the most fun.

Thanks for the comments folks. All options seemed to work well as far as adding the font selections to, say, Styled Edit… But WonderBrush will have none of it. From the looks of it, Wonderbrush seems trained to only look in:

boot/system/data/fonts/ttfonts ((?))

And as I said earlier, I can’t add to it. clasqm, however, did raise another question in my mind (some nice fonts on your site btw). Is it possible to make a .hpkg file to install fonts into the above path/folder ?

Again, Thanks

Yes, that is regrettably a shortcomming of WonderBrush. I do hope stippi will find the time to release a tiny-fix version one day.

Packageing fonts is quite easy, when you’ve learned how to build HPKGs (see 3.2 Making it into a proper .hpkg package).

There are also a few fonts packages in HaikuDepot and with haikuporter you can automatically create all the fonts in haikuports’ media-fonts.

Though, just putting dowloaded fonts into ~/config/non-packaged/data/fonts (or its system mirror location) is of course much easier. If just all apps were updated to deal with it…

Regards,
Humdinger

Duplicate post. Damn you, Web+!

Yes, it is possible. There is a switch in the hpkg specification that tells a package never to install itself into the /boot/home hierarchy. Never used it myself yet.

Also Haiku at system level seems to recognize any font file below the fonts folder. The ttf, otf and psfonts directories are just there for the benefit of the obsessively neat (as I recall that was not true in BeOS). So you could make a hpkg that dumped all font files into a ttf folder, install that hpkg to /boot/system and you’d be all set. in fact, my font sets that contain ttf files do install to a ttf folder. If you installed by moving the file to /boot/home/config/packages. just drag it out of there and drop it into /boot/system/packages instead (or if your nightly is recent, just doubleclick on the hpkg to load it into Haikudepot).

But the real question here is what on earth is Wonderbrush doing running its own font server? That is supposed to be an OS-level service.

Thanks. And while this won’t help your problem with Wonderbrush, I’ve just put up instructions for the MS Common Core fonts: clasquin-johnson.co.za

you know, i’ve wondered this same thing, myself.

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