{"id":35,"date":"2008-01-22T23:19:38","date_gmt":"2008-01-22T13:19:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/christopherowen.id.au\/blog\/2008\/01\/22\/not-any-helvetica-i-know\/"},"modified":"2008-01-22T23:19:38","modified_gmt":"2008-01-22T13:19:38","slug":"not-any-helvetica-i-know","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/christopherowen.au\/blog\/2008\/01\/22\/not-any-helvetica-i-know\/","title":{"rendered":"Not any Helvetica I know"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Just after I swore I would use my Linux box at home for <strong>real work<\/strong> rather than constantly battling with configuration and upkeep I&#8217;ve spent about two hours tonight trying to get any web page using the Helvetica font not to look like total arse (read: aliased) in Firefox. It turns out that, at least in a standard Gentoo distribution, applications that ask Fontconfig for Helvetica will get a lame arse low resolution bitmap font that lives in the <samp>\/usr\/share\/font\/75dpi<\/samp> directory. The Fontconfig utility <kbd>fc-match<\/kbd> is useful in situations like these.<\/p>\n<div>\n<dl>\n<dt>&gt; <kbd>fc-match Helvetica<\/kbd><\/dt>\n<dd><samp>helvR12.pcf.gz: &#8220;Helvetica&#8221; &#8220;Regular&#8221;<\/samp><\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n<p>After trialling numerous successful ways of getting the system to select a different font instead, it turns out the easiest way to avoid this situation is to sym link the <em>no bitmap font<\/em> configuration file into the Fontconfig configuration directory.<\/p>\n<div>\n<ol>\n<li><kbd>cd \/etc\/fonts\/conf.d\/<\/kbd><\/li>\n<li><kbd>ln -s ..\/conf.avail\/70-no-bitmaps.conf 70-no-bitmaps.conf<\/kbd><\/li>\n<li><kbd>fc-cache<\/kbd><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n<p>After this is completed, <kbd>fc-match<\/kbd> tells me a much happier story.<\/p>\n<div>\n<dl>\n<dt>&gt; <kbd>fc-match Helvetica<\/kbd><\/dt>\n<dd><samp>n019003l.pfb: &#8220;Nimbus Sans L&#8221; &#8220;Regular&#8221;<\/samp><\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n<p>Where &#8220;Nimbus Sans L&#8221; is a very nice, Helvetica like, truetype font. Hope this knowledge may save someone the same two hour torment and distraction from other, more interesting tasks such as learning <a href=\"http:\/\/scala-lang.org\/\">Scala<\/a> (oh you know, just purely for example, maybe).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Just after I swore I would use my Linux box at home for real work rather than constantly battling with configuration and upkeep I&#8217;ve spent about two hours tonight trying to get any web page using the Helvetica font not to look like total arse (read: aliased) in Firefox. It turns out that, at least [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9,14],"tags":[46,49,53,60],"class_list":["post-35","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gentoo","category-linux","tag-fonts","tag-gentoo","tag-howto","tag-linux"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/christopherowen.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/christopherowen.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/christopherowen.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christopherowen.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christopherowen.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/christopherowen.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/christopherowen.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christopherowen.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christopherowen.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}