Arch Linux

battra

Member

From: Earth.US.Illinois.Chicago

Registered: 2006-05-12

Posts: 71

missing helvetica font

Could someone please tell me how I go about installing the Helvetica font?   I suppose I could maybe copy it over from Windows and manually install it.  But , what is the Arch way to get the font? 

First, some info:

I've already installed ttf-ms-fonts package.

There's been stuff metioned in other threads, like here, but they didn't seem to work for me.

Basically, there's no helvetica font in apps like Firefox and I'm getting errors/warnings when starting apps like Eterm and xmms.  Here are examples:

In XMMS:

** WARNING **: Failed to open font: "-adobe-helvetica-bold-r-*-*-10-*"

In Eterm:

Eterm:  Error:  Unable to load font "-adobe-helvetica-medium-r-normal--10-100-75-75-p-56-iso8859-1".  Falling back on "fixed"

The menus in the above apps are all fixed fonts instead of helvetica.

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"I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance."
- Socrates

sh__

Member

Registered: 2005-07-19

Posts: 272

Re: missing helvetica font

Seems like eterm is looking for 75dpi helvetica, so

pacman -S xorg-fonts-75dpi

You can also install xorg-fonts-100dpi if it is a better match for your resolution.

Btw, helvetica is a bitmap font and it is not included in the MS fonts package (arial is the MS ttf equivalent of helvetica).

battra

Member

From: Earth.US.Illinois.Chicago

Registered: 2006-05-12

Posts: 71

Re: missing helvetica font

Thanks a lot.  I tried both xorg-fonts-100dpi and xorg-fonts-75dpi.

It did eliminate the font errors from Eterm and XMMS.  Unfortunately, it also made my fluxbox menus and toolbar uglier and smaller for some reason. 

Without the 100/75 dpi fonts, my fluxbox menus are larger and smoother.  I don't know.  Fonts in Linux have always screwed me up and confused me.     :?

Well, it's good to find out how to eliminate the font errors from XMMS/Eterm, at least.  Think I'll do without the 100dpi/75dpi fonts until I can figure out a way to use them without messing up my fluxbox menus/toolbar.  I'd rather live with ugly XMMS menus over ugly fluxbox menus.   

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"I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance."
- Socrates

Gullible Jones

Member

Registered: 2004-12-29

Posts: 4,863

Re: missing helvetica font

If you have the 75/100 DPI fonts installed, some applications will automatically select them over other fonts, even though they look quite hideous. IMHO they should simply be removed from XOrg, they eat up almost as much space as all the other XOrg stuff combined and aren't even close to worth it...

n0gabor

Member

From: Hungary / Budapest

Registered: 2006-02-10

Posts: 95

Re: missing helvetica font

there is a way to install helvetica font to Arch?

so many application uses it, mostly commericals, and some of them are hard-coded with helvetica...

i wonder why Arch doesn't have urw fonts...

byte

Member

From: Düsseldorf (DE)

Registered: 2006-05-01

Posts: 2,046

Re: missing helvetica font

Install ghostscript or just the gsfonts package.

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