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#1 2009-09-13 14:15:08

Allamgir
Member
Registered: 2009-06-11
Posts: 168

ttf-ms-fonts Courier=Courier New Helvetica=Arial?

Today I noticed that Courier is just a copy of Courier New and Helvetica is just Arial when I installed ttf-ms-fonts. I do not like this, since Courier and Helvetica are two of my favorite fonts, and I really dislike the replacements. I have these fonts in ttf format on a different computer, but is this supposed to happen? Am I better off just removing ttf-ms-fonts and dropping the files in my /usr/share/fonts/ folders manually, and would that even work?


дɭɭɑӎɠїɾ

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#2 2009-09-13 20:19:50

Crows
Member
From: Wales
Registered: 2008-09-05
Posts: 92

Re: ttf-ms-fonts Courier=Courier New Helvetica=Arial?

Not sure about Courier, but I'm 98% certain that Helvetica is non-free and copyrighted: the package provides a link to an alternative font simply so that any websites or word docs or whatever that expect it don't get confused.

A .ttf is a .ttf, so chuck it in ~/.fonts and it should work.

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#3 2009-09-13 20:37:15

tlvb
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From: Sweden
Registered: 2008-10-06
Posts: 297
Website

Re: ttf-ms-fonts Courier=Courier New Helvetica=Arial?

The Helvetica supplied is not the same, it is obvious if you look on the capital G.


I need a sorted list of all random numbers, so that I can retrieve a suitable one later with a binary search instead of having to iterate through the generation process every time.

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#4 2009-09-13 22:49:03

thisoldman
Member
From: Pittsburgh
Registered: 2009-04-25
Posts: 1,172

Re: ttf-ms-fonts Courier=Courier New Helvetica=Arial?

Courier and Helvetica are bitmap fonts, Courier New and Arial are TrueType fonts. Turn off anti-aliasing and you'll see more differences. There are differences in the encodings, too: looks like the MS fonts might be encoded using UTF-16 and Courier and Helvetica are mapped using UTF-8. The MS fonts raise warnings when opened  in FontForge, The bitmapped fonts don't.

On my display, using Openbox and mostly GTK apps, fontmanager.py shows Helvetica identical to Arial, Courier is identical to Courier New. FontForge and gucharmap, however, show the differences between the fonts.

Last edited by thisoldman (2009-09-13 22:50:34)

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#5 2009-09-13 22:56:35

e_tank
Member
Registered: 2006-12-21
Posts: 80

Re: ttf-ms-fonts Courier=Courier New Helvetica=Arial?

as thisoldman said it's because helvetica and courier are bitmap fonts and the default font config behaviour is to reassign them to arial and courier new respectively.  try this as root

rm /etc/fonts/conf.d/29-replace-bitmap-fonts.conf

then restart x.  the above file is just a symlink to the font config file /etc/fonts/conf.avail/29-replace-bitmap-fonts.conf so it's safe to remove it.  if you want to restore it do the following as root

cd /etc/fonts/conf.d
ln -s ../conf.avail/29-replace-bitmap-fonts.conf 29-replace-bitmap-fonts.conf

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#6 2009-09-13 23:00:51

thisoldman
Member
From: Pittsburgh
Registered: 2009-04-25
Posts: 1,172

Re: ttf-ms-fonts Courier=Courier New Helvetica=Arial?

Thanks,  @e-tank. I wondered where the link was located.

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