Linux Desktop Hacks

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Chapter 4, Related to X

#25 Use Windows and Mac Fonts

HACK

If your Windows partition is NTFS, you won’t be able to run this command

because your access is read-only. To get around this, copy the fonts to a

directory on your Linux system and run the command. Then copy the file it

creates, fonts.scale, to media you can access from Windows, such as a floppy

disk or USB memory key. From there you can put it in your C:\Windows\

fonts directory. You will have to repeat this work each time you add new

fonts to your Windows partition that you want to use in Linux, so you have

to question if it is really worth it.

You now need to tell XFree86 that this font directory exists and it should

use it. You can do this in one of two ways. The first method is to add a

FontPath line to your X11 configuration file, which is commonly /etc/X11/

XF86Config-4:

FontPath"/mnt/windows/Windows/Fonts"

When you have added this, you will need to restart your X server.

Remember to use proper capitalization for your Windows

files when accessing them from Linux. For example, the

main Windows directory is sometimes spelled with all caps:

WINDOWS. So, you might need to change your font paths

appropriately.

An alternative method if you are using the XFS font server is to use the

chkfontpath command to add the path dynamically:

foo@bar:~$ chkfontpath --add /mnt/windows/Windows/Fonts

If you add the directory using this command, you must ...