Re: no font shown with tamil.el

[Robert J. Chassell]

Thank you!  Success!  At least success in showing Hindi and Tamil
fonts in the HELLO buffer after running the `mkfontdir' command,
followed again by the `xset' commands.    (I have revised my `example'
text and appended it below.)

However, I was not able to see any fonts glyphs with the `xfd'
command on the `cdac' font.  This command:

   xfd -fn -altsys-DV_TTSurekh-medium-r-normal--20-0-0-0-p-0-devanagari-cdac

gave me this error message:

    Warning: Cannot convert string
    "-altsys-DV_TTSurekh-medium-r-normal--20-0-0-0-p-0-devanagari-cdac" to
    type FontStruct
    xfd:  no font to display

But I do see glyphs with the following command:

   xfd -fn *-cdac

This shows me the glyphs for

    TTDurga-Medium-R-Normal--22-160-100-100-P-74-Assamese-CDAC

However, the command 

   xfd -fn TTDurga-Medium-R-Normal--22-160-100-100-P-74-Assamese-CDAC

fails.

(I moved my *.ttf and *.bdf files to the
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/ directory, along with the *.pcf files.)



As for the success:

Here is text for .....emacs/INSTALL that describes what I did that is
successful.  I added text about using "mkfontdir" and "xlsfonts -fn '*-cdac'"


    For     .....emacs/INSTALL
    following the end of the sample Indian fonts makefile

/----------------

For example, Robert J. Chassell downloaded the following TTF files
from    http://www.gitasupersite.iitk.ac.in/installfont.htm
to the /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/ttf-font-dir/ directory:

    Asdr0ntt.TTF
    BNDR0ntt.ttf
    DVYG0ntt.ttf
    DVYG1ntt.ttf
    GJAV0ntt.ttf
    KNUM0ntt.ttf
    MLKR0ntt.ttf
    ORSR0ntt.ttf
    PNAM0ntt.ttf
    TLHM0ntt.ttf
    TMVL0ntt.ttf

He then downloaded the latest stable FreeType distribution from
http://www.freetype.org; that is to say, he downloaded

    http://unc.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/freetype/freetype-1.3.1.tar.gz
    1394 kb

He unpacked FreeType and built it:    ./configure && time make

Then, to build `ttf2bdf', he went into the  freetype-1.3.1/contrib/ttf2bdf/
directory and built that:    ./configure && time make

(He then copied the `ttf2bdf' executable to the `/usr/local/bin/'
directory for convenience.)

In the /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/ttf-font-dir/ directory, he
downcased the names of the *.ttf files and included them in the
makefile to convert to the appropriate BDF/PCF fonts.  Note that the
font files he downloaded are somewhat different from those listed
above.

He created the following makefile,
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/ttf-font-dir/convert2bdf-pcf
with this contents:

TTFS=   asdr0ntt.ttf:Assamese\
        bndr0ntt.ttf:Bengali\
        dvyg0ntt.ttf:Devanagari\
        dvyg1ntt.ttf:Roman\
        gjav0ntt.ttf:Gujarati\
        knum0ntt.ttf:Kannada\
        mlkr0ntt.ttf:Malayalam\
        orsr0ntt.ttf:Oriya\
        pnam0ntt.ttf:Punjabi\
        tlhm0ntt.ttf:Telugu\
        tmvl0ntt.ttf:Tamil\

all:
        for f in ${TTFS}; do \
          ttf=`echo $$f | sed 's/:.*$$//'`; \
          reg=`echo $$f | sed 's/[^:]*://'`; \
          base=`basename $$ttf .ttf`; \
          echo Converting "$$ttf to $$base-XX.bdf/pcf with registry $$reg"; \
          for i in 16 24; do \
            ttf2bdf -p $${i} -r 100 -l 0_255 $$ttf > temp; \
            sed "/^FONT /s/ISO10646-1/$$reg-CDAC/" <temp >$$base-$$i.bdf; \
            bdftopcf $$base-$$i.bdf > $$base-$$i.pcf; \
          done; \
        done
        rm -f temp

clean:
        rm -f *.pcf *.bdf

### end makefile


Then he ran the command:

    make -f convert2bdf-pcf

and it converts the .ttf files to .bdf and .pcf.

He moved all the fonts into the /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/
directory with the commands:

    mv *.pcf ..
    mv *.bdf ..
    mv *.ttf ..

Then he used the `mkfontdir' and `xset' commands to install the fonts

    mkfontdir
    xset fp+ /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/
    xset fp rehash

He confirmed that the fonts are available to Emacs with this command:

     xlsfonts -fn '*-cdac'

and was able to see all of them by starting a fresh instance of GNU
Emacs and typing `C-h h' (view-hello-file)

----------------/

-- 
    Robert J. Chassell                         Rattlesnake Enterprises
    http://www.rattlesnake.com                  GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8
    http://www.teak.cc                             address@hidden