Loading Fonts
The Text tool in the GIMP requires fonts served
up by the X Window System. Unfortunately, not every X Window System
is delivered with all the cool fonts you'll want to have. It is
possible, though, to download a nice set of fonts from the Internet
and to install them on your system. This section describes how to do
that. Note that although the advice given here will work on many
Linux and UNIX systems, it is not guaranteed to work on all of them.
The goal of this section is to be helpful, but due to the variability
of different systems, it would be impossible to cover all cases.
There are two widely used font collections for computers running the X
Window System. These collections are called freefonts and sharefonts. They can be found at many
places around the web, but two places you might try are:
ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp/fonts/
ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/linux/X11/fonts/
The files to download will be named something like
freefonts-0.10.tar.gz and
sharefonts-0.10.tar.gz. The names
may change to reflect updated version numbers.
Once downloaded, they must be installed in a font directory. For
RedHat Linux systems, fonts are typically installed in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/. However, this may be different for other
systems running the X Window System. It is not necessary to install
the fonts in the system directory. They can be installed anywhere
that is convenient--even in the user's home directory. This last
option may be necessary for a user who wants to use great fonts but
doesn't have root privilege.
The following instructions assume that the installation is being made
to the user's directory called ~/FONTS. After downloading
the two font packages and moving them to this directory, the
instructions for installing the freefonts package are as
follows:
% cd ~/FONTS
% gzip -dc freefonts-0.10.tar.gz | tar xvf -
This uncompresses and unpacks the font collection archive. This is
followed by the commands that tell the X Window System where the new
fonts live:
% xset fp+ ~/FONTS/freefont
% xset fp rehash
Follow the same instructions to install the
sharefonts package
and that's all there is to it! The
freefonts package contains
79 fonts and the
sharefonts package 22. The next time the GIMP
is run, these new fonts will be available to the
Text tool.
If these fonts were not pre-installed in the usual system directory,
you'll need to tell the X Window System where to find them each time you
start up a new X session. This can be automated by putting the
last two commands above in your .xinitrc file.
