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Re: Dosemu practically full-screen


Paul --
Is it possible that the missing step involves mkfontdir and xset fp
rehash? Not that I really understand what those involve, but I've come
across references in preparing fonts for X.

It would be great if we could really figure this out and document it.
For one thing, when I was playing around, I came across some pretty
compelling-looking fonts -- like a Courier 12, I think. (In my case,
they weren't completely usable out of the box, because they substituted
some of the XyWrite borders with things like accented characters -- but
I think that's something I *think* I could fix within Xy, if I can
remember how.) As windowed Xy, they promised to be very handsome, and
even if they aren't scalable, if one could specify the correct size, you
could create an all-but-full-screen Xy -- that is, a Xy window which
occupied the entire screen but still allowed full access to the Linux
desktop.

Does x-ttcidfont-conf create the new font from the original ttf file? My
dosemu fonts, which are in /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc/dosemu, all end in
*.pcf.gz -- I guess these come out-of-the-box and prepped for dosemu.
But there are in /usr/share/fonts altogether 1149 of these, and since
one can apparently make use of several dozen of these without strain --
why not?

With that in mind -- when you toyed with your screen font sizes, was it
just trying out various sizes? In my limited experimentation the other
day, I tried substituting proportional values, somewhat as you had
suggested for Andale-Mono, but I didn't have much luck.

In a way, the fact that tools such as defoma have not been deprecated
might be a good sign for dosemu down the road. I don't really understand
what Wayland is going to do -- I guess eventually it will displace X, or
a lot of parts of it -- but if it's still important for Debian to
preserve these somewhat arcane packages, you'd have to see it as a
pretty good sign that the possibility for DOS emulation will remain for
quite some time.


-Rafe

On 12/03/2012 10:31 PM, Paul Lagasse wrote:
Rafe,

On 12/03/2012 09:24 AM, Raphael wrote:
Are you happy with the result?

Yes, I am, but I am used to using a windowed Xy4.
Having said that, just playing around with the nonscaling xfonts that
are available makes me curious to try the MS fonts out. However, I'd
actually be more interested in the explanation than copying your
fixed setup or trying it out blind -- I was getting ready to escalate
to the dosemu listserv -- for one thing, I really want to know why
these fonts never seem to register on my system, and I'm quite
curious how you worked through it

Years ago, in 10.04 I'm pretty sure, I lost Deja Vu and other fonts
that I was used to having available for Dosemu. I did a lot of reading
online about making fonts available to X, and tried out xfs (X font
server) and defoma (debian font manager) and somehow somewhere along
the way I may have picked up access to Andale Mono (or it may have had
nothing to do with me -- I was stumbling around without a lot of
knowledge). But in any case, I revisited xfs and defoma on Sunday, and
did some reading online again, and discovered where defoma's
directories were, which I'd never known before. In /var/lib/defoma's
subdirectories I discovered x-ttcidfont-conf.d (folder), whose
subcontents included a link to Andale Mono and fonts.scale and
fonts.dir files with references similar to:

Andale_Mono.ttf -monotype-andale
mono-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-m-0-iso8859-2

I knew that these fonts.* files were important to making the fonts
available to X from my earlier and recent reading, but that's the sum
of my knowledge, except that lines like the above were the sort of
output I was looking for when I ran xlsfonts ....|sort|uniq>
scalable_fonts. So I figured that here, in /var/lib/defoma, was where
I was getting my 12.04 Andale Mono for Dosemu from (from previous
rooting around in /usr/share/fonts I knew that I'd never found the
right fonts.* files there). I guess that in installing 12.04 over
10.04 I'd retained access to Andale Mono that I'd acquired in 10.04,
which may be why I have it in 12.04 and you don't.

So, in 12.10 I installed defoma and x-ttcidfont-conf, which recreated
the directory structure of /var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d, but did
not recreate the link to Andale Mono or the fonts.* files. So I went
with my other option, which was to copy from one computer to the other
the defoma files, via a defoma.tar.gz file, replacing all the contents
of /var/lib/defoma in 12.10 (the directory structure that the defoma
etc installation had created in 12.10 was the same, but with fewer
folders and no files). And things worked.

I've since recalled that on my wife's portable I'd left 8.04 installed
alongside 10.04 when I upgrade her machine, and looking there today
discovered in /var/lib/defoma/... links to DejaVu and other fonts I
used to have. I don't know if I can incorporate or somehow use the
settings from 8.04 to access DejaVu in Dosemu again, but I've
compressed her old /var/lib/defoma directory for playing with at
sometime in the future.


Paul