Re: no font shown with tamil.el

[Robert J. Chassell]

Still no success.

   "Robert J. Chassell" <address@hidden> writes:

   > The fonts are going to become part of the distribution anyhow,

   Are they?

My misunderstanding.  I misread the documentation to mean that I no
longer had to do something extra to get fonts to work on a more or
less standard GNU/Linux system.

In /usr/local/src/emacs/INSTALL, after the header line that says, 
`* Extra fonts', it would be helpful to tell the reader that

    GNU Emacs does not include fonts and does not install them.  You must
    do this yourself. 

This would help prevent the kind of mistake I made.

In any event, I followed the advice that Kenichi Handa
<address@hidden> gave, and followed the instructions in

    /usr/local/src/emacs/INSTALL

Even after following those instructions (as I understood them),
neither the Hindi nor the Tamil fonts are shown, although a Hindi font
is displayed in an instance of GNU Emacs 20.

The instructions in INSTALL presume the reader understands quite a bit
about fonts.  I don't.  But, as far as I can tell, I followed the
instructions correctly.  But I still don't see the Hindi or Tamil
fonts

Here is what I did.

I wrote this text in the third person so that you could include the
good parts of this in INSTALL immediated after the example makefile.
Something like this is needed, so long as it presents an example that
succeeds.  This particular text, sad to say, describes procedures that
fail.

    For     .....emacs/INSTALL
    following line 214

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

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 put the PCF fonts into the /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/
directory with the command:   mv *.pcf ..

Then he used the `xset' command to install the fonts

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

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


==> But GNU Emacs 21 still did not show the Hindi and Tamil fonts,
using today's GNU Emacs CVS snapshot and today's Debian `testing'
distribution of GNU/Linux.  (I also rebooted the laptop, but that did
no good either.)

What should I do?

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