Fonts for XyWrite in Dosemu

[Paul Lagasse pglagasse@xxxxxxxx]

This is mainly a topic that has interested Rafe and myself, but I
recently spent some time trying to figure out how to utilize monospaced
TrueType fonts in Dosemu, so that there would be some additional options
in more recent Ubuntu releases beyond the few offered by Dosemu itself.
I had finally grasped some sense, however vague, of what needed to be
done in Ubuntu and its kin and sought to test it out on a new install of
Xubuntu 13.04. The solution is dependent upon defoma (DEbian FOnt
MAnager), which offers a relatively easy way to make Truetype fonts
available to Dosemu. Unfortunately, defoma is no longer included by
Debian, and Ubuntu as well as of 13.04, as I discovered during
post-installation setup.
There is, however, a way around this, which I have tested twice, once in
the Xubuntu 13.04 installation I was playing with, and a second time in
a Xubuntu 13.04 live session. The files previously created by defoma
must be copied into a location (I used a somewhat logical one,
/usr/share/fonts/X11/TrueType/), then you must run

fc-cache -fv

then

xset fp+ /path/to/font/files (in this case, /usr/share/fonts/X11/TrueType/)
This last line, "xset fp+ /usr/share/fonts/X11/TrueType/" in my case
(which translates roughly as, append the following font path to the X
fontpaths), must be added to the Startup Applications to make the fonts
available to X applications when Ubuntu et al. is restarted. Presumably
this will work until Ubuntu abandons X; alternately it will work in
Debian and Mint Debian Edition until they move away from X as well.
The fonts I have available at present include Andale Mono, DejaVu Sans
Mono, Free Mono, and Vera Mono. Andale and DejaVu work the best. To
avoid having to use defoma to create the necessary files, it would be
easiest to just email the files defoma produced (ie, my
/usr/share/fonts/X11/TrueType/ dir) offlist. Defoma does not produce the
hints proper files in 12.04, and so I have recycled hints files from
7.04, 8.04, and 10.04, and I won't bother covering how defoma is used to
create the TrueType directory. I might be able to add Liberation and
Droid Mono fonts as well, but that will take further experimentation,
using 10.04 probably to try to create correct hints files.
Since I have not tried to clean up my TrueType directory, it does
contain some chaff, but in terms of real file space, it is minor, since
the files are all symlinks and a couple text files.

Paul Lagasse