I recently encountered a problem with the Type 1 (pfa) Luxi fonts
distributed with Fedora's X.org xorg-x11-fonts-Type1 packages. My system
is still FC5, but as far as I can tell the situation still exists with FC6.
The problem is that OpenOffice generates incorrect PDFs in some cases
when the Luxi fonts are used. This doesn't happen with the Fedora 2.0.2
OOo, only the latest stable OOo 2.2 from www.openoffice.org. There may
be an OOo problem, but it only affects these particular fonts, and only
the Type 1 version, as distributed with Fedora. Other Type 1 fonts seem
to work fine.
Digging a little further, I find that the Luxi fonts have long been
available in TrueType format (ttf). Further, the Luxi fonts are
duplicated (in ttf format) in the Fedora xorg-x11-fonts-truetype
package. So, if the ttf files are included in the X.org packages, why
aren't they being used?
Well, it turns out that the directory where the Luxi ttf files are
installed is not included in the standard fontconfig directory list.
The dirs in /etc/fonts/fonts.conf are:
/usr/share/fonts
/usr/share/X11/fonts/Type1
/usr/share/X11/fonts/OTF
~/.fonts
The Luxi Type 1 files are installed in:
/usr/share/X11/fonts/Type1
The Luxi ttf files are installed in:
/usr/share/X11/fonts/TTF
If that directory is added to my /etc/fonts/local.conf, then both Type 1
and ttf formats are available; OOo prefers the ttf version, the PDFs are
perfect and everybody is happy.
Apparently SuSE Linux provides these fonts in both Type 1 and ttf
formats, as I found when my original problem with PDF output could not
be reproduced under SuSE Linux. Fc-list on SuSE lists both, although the
files are installed in /usr/share/fonts/{Type1,truetype}/
Comments? Suggestions? Should I file a report, or am I missing something
obvious (again)?
<Joe
