TTFs, Japanese and RedHat7.x

Introduction

These are a few notes about how I eventually got Unicode-oriented TrueType Fonts working in a Japanese environment in RedHat Linux 7.1 and 7.2.

The main reason I wanted to get the fonts working was to have them available in Tcl/Tk 8.3+, however other applications such as Netscape and Mozilla were also able to use them.

The fonts I wished to use were the Microsoft Arial (arialuni.ttf) which is installed on the Windows partition of my system, and the Bitstream Cyberbit font (cyberbit.ttf).

The Process

the fonts need to be available in the /usr/share/fonts/ja/TrueType/ directory. (This directory will have been created if you identify at installation time that Japanese is a language you want to use.) It is OK for them to be in another directory such as /usr/share/fonts/default/TrueType/ provided that directory is listed in the /etc/X11/fs/config file. In the case of arialuni.ttf I did this with a symbolic link to the file in the Windows partition.
having put the fonts in that place, you need to make/update the fonts.scale and fonts.dir files. You can do this is follows:
- ttmkfdir > fonts.dir
- edit the resulting fonts.dir file to make sure the "jisx0208.1990-0" set of codes are available for the arialuni and cyberbit fonts. You can do this by duplicating one of the lines (e.g. koi8-ru) and editing it to say "jisx0208.1990-0" at the end. If you are ever likely to use JIS X 0212 as well, you may wish to add "jisx0212.1990-0" lines. Once you have done that, you need to update the number in the first line of the file to relect the number of font lines present. (For some reason the ttmkfdir utility only seems to generate lines for ISO-8859-* and KOI8 character sets.)
- copy the fonts.dir file over the fonts.scale file
restart the font server. Rebooting is an easy way to do it.

The new Japanese fonts should now be available to a heap of X applications which allow you to select fonts. Netscape 4.7x will see the Japanese portions of the arialuni and cyberbit fonts, but will not try and use them as Unicode fonts - you need Netscape 6, Mozilla, etc. for that.

In Tcl/Tk, you need to create a font, e.g.:

font create selfont -family "arial unicode ms" -size 24

and specify that in the Tk widget with -font selfont. The full set of fontnames available to Tcl/Tk can be seen by running Tcl's font families command.

Here is a sample of a Tk widget (my Tcl/Tk Japanese vocab drill system) using the MSArial font at 24 pts.

Jim Breen
April 2002

Jim Breen's Home Page and Japanese Page.