Bug 119890

I cannot reproduce this. Works fine for me on SuSE Linux 10.0.

I alos cannot reproduce this. It works fine for me on SuSE Linux 9.3,
just after `Apply' in the Edit Panel I see the new size with the
new font.

Please be sure to have installed package xorg-x11-fonts-scalable.

The package "ghostscript-fonts-std" is also necessary. If this package is
not installed, the problem occurs as described in the original comment.
But "ghostscript-fonts-std" is required by xfig, i.e. it can only be missing
if the user ignored the requirement.

Move bug to product "SUSE LInux 10.0" to make it visible for the reporter.

ghostscript-fonts-std in installed:

rpm -qa | grep ghostscript
ghostscript-fonts-std-8.15rc1-16

Ahmm ... I can not reproduce this bug.  It worsk just fine here.
Do you have installed xorg-x11-fonts-scalable.

I think xfig doesn't use any of the fonts in xorg-x11-fonts-scalable.
Nevertheless please check whether you have this package installed
and whether it makes a difference.

The package ghostscript-fonts-std contains the URW fonts which are
used almost exclusively in the SuSE package of xfig because of the
patch "xfig.3.2.4-urw-fonts.dif" applied to our xfig package.  Without
that patch, xfig used bitmap fonts for display on screen which are
available only in a discrete set of sizes and therefore the size
didn't always change when you changed the font-size with the edit
tool. Only if you did hit the next available size in bitmap form, the
size really changed. For printing, printer resident PostScript fonts
were used, which are scalable. Therefore the sizes of the bitmap fonts
seen on screen were often very different from the font sizes in the
printed output. To fix this problem, we patched xfig to use the
scalable URW fonts, which are a compatible to the standard printer
resident PostScript fonts. Ghostscript uses them for that purpose.  By
using the URW fonts, we could achieve that the fonts scale nicely to
all sizes on screen and that the display on screen looks much more
similar to the printout.

Because exactly this is not working for you, my first guess was
that something is wrong with your URW fonts.

You say you have the package installed.

Are the fonts accessible via the X11 core fonts system as well?
I.e. are the URW fonts listed by "xlsfonts"? Please
check with

    xlsfonts | grep -i urw

What is the output of this command?

Maybe the fonts are not found in the font path.  What does

      xset q | grep -A1 Font

reports and what happend after

      xset fp+ /usr/share/ghostscript/fonts

More info:

We fixed this by recompiling the xfig rpms without the urw fonts. We do not have
a urw font entry in our X11 config:
"
Section "Files"
        RgbPath      "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/rgb"
        FontPath     "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/"
        FontPath     "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/CID/"
        FontPath     "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/:unscaled"
        FontPath     "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi/:unscaled"
        FontPath     "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/:unscaled"
        FontPath     "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi/"
        FontPath     "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/"
        FontPath     "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/"
        FontPath     "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/truetype"
EndSection
"

because we run many different unices and like remote display to work across all
of them. 

Suse xfig seems to be using non-standard font names, rather than the canonical ones.
Lack of xorg.conf urw font entry means that fonts directory (magically built
during installation) does not have the urw fonts in it.

Hope that helps.

If you use xfig without the URW fonts patch, the sizes on screen will
jump, i.e. not all sizes will make a difference on screen although all
sizes make a difference in printout.

That is very inconvenient as well. Often on screen it looks like as if
a text fits into a box for example, but when printing it suddenly
doesn't or vice versa.

Using the URW fonts fixes this problem, the display on screen and the
printout then look almost identical.

Thanks for reopening, Mike (Rose). Now we can finally close this with the
correct resolution: INVALID.

You're using a font setup, which is *not* supported at all by SUSE LINUX 10.0.

As xfig is much more usable with the URW fonts, I think it is a better
solution to put the URW directory back into your font path and solve
the problem with the remote display on other Unix machines by
installing the URW fonts there as well.  That's very easy, just copy
the directory /usr/share/ghostscript/fonts/ from your SuSE Linux
machine to some place on the other Unix machine and add it to your
font path there.

(In reply to comment #12)
We've not noticed a problem with fonts "jumping" on screen.
Postscript fonts not printing out as displayed? not seen that either.

Yes, maybe we could install /usr/share/ghostscript/fonts/ from SuSE Linux on all
our UNIX machines, but what about remote users on other countries, people with
laptops, etc. ??
I guess we could suggest they all do the same...

Scientific collaboration and all that - we have lots of users from all over the
world logging in remotely. Non-standard fonts cause everyone problems.

Surely xfig should be able to cope with and without the urw fonts?

See initial report: It was such a report which has lead to the
urw font patch. And as you can see on the report your removal
cause similar reports.  OK one could buy the real Adobe fonts
to avoid fonts "jumping", but for the SuSE Linux box this is
simply noop.

Example from the xfit.3.2.4-urw-fonts.dif:

+/*  {"-*-times-medium-r-normal--", (struct xfont*) NULL},			*/
+    {"-URW-*Nimbus Roman No9 L-medium-r-normal--", (struct xfont*) NULL},	/* Times-Roman */


I.e. the patch replaces "-*-times-medium-r-normal--" with the compatible
URW font here. The original pattern matches only the following fonts:

mfabian@magellan:/work/SRC/all/xfig$ xlsfonts -fn "-*-times-medium-r-normal--*" | grep "iso8859-1$"
-adobe-times-medium-r-normal--10-100-75-75-p-54-iso8859-1
-adobe-times-medium-r-normal--11-80-100-100-p-54-iso8859-1
-adobe-times-medium-r-normal--12-120-75-75-p-64-iso8859-1
-adobe-times-medium-r-normal--14-100-100-100-p-74-iso8859-1
-adobe-times-medium-r-normal--14-140-75-75-p-74-iso8859-1
-adobe-times-medium-r-normal--17-120-100-100-p-84-iso8859-1
-adobe-times-medium-r-normal--18-180-75-75-p-94-iso8859-1
-adobe-times-medium-r-normal--20-140-100-100-p-96-iso8859-1
-adobe-times-medium-r-normal--24-240-75-75-p-124-iso8859-1
-adobe-times-medium-r-normal--25-180-100-100-p-125-iso8859-1
-adobe-times-medium-r-normal--34-240-100-100-p-170-iso8859-1
-adobe-times-medium-r-normal--8-80-75-75-p-44-iso8859-1
mfabian@magellan:/work/SRC/all/xfig$

which are bitmap fonts from the xorg-x11-fonts-75dpi and
xorg-x11-fonts-100dpi packages.

As you can see, only some sizes are available.

If you try to use sizes which are not available, xfig will use
the closest available size on display.

But when printing, xfig will not use these bitmap fonts, it will just
write the names for the standard PostScript fonts into the PostScript
output, in this case "Times-Roman".  As the printer (or Ghostscript
using the URW fonts) can scale "Times-Roman" to any requested sizes,
all sizes are possible when printing.

Mike Rose> Postscript fonts not printing out as displayed? not seen
Mike Rose> that either.

I always suffered from the problem, I still remember that it was like
that in 1994 when I was using Xfig on HP-UX although I didn't
understand why this happened back than. I just adjusted the size on
screen until the printout came out correctly and accepted that it
didn't look right on screen.

Werner> OK one could buy the real Adobe fonts to avoid fonts "jumping", but
Werner> for the SuSE Linux box this is simply noop.

And it would be the same problem as with the URW fonts if these
fonts are not installed everywhere.

Mike Rose> Non-standard fonts cause everyone problems.

The URW fonts are probably the most widespread scalable PostScript
fonts nowadays. I would say they are almost standard.

Mike Rose> Surely xfig should be able to cope with and without the urw fonts?

Please ask the upstream xfig developers for that feature.  Although
possible, this isn't easy.  As you can see from the
xfig.3.2.4-urw-fonts.dif, currently xfig can only use one font for
each of the standard PostScript fonts. And this is hardcoded in the
C-source, not in a config file.

The best solution would be to have this in a config file and
to be able to write a list of XLFDs for each font, i.e.
first try 

  -URW-*Nimbus Roman No9 L-medium-r-normal--*

and if that pattern is not available fall back to

  -*-times-medium-r-normal--*

Even better would be to change xfig not to use X11 core fonts but
rather use Xft2/fontconfig instead. Xft2/fontconfig uses client side
font rendering, i.e. in that case the fonts would always be used on
the machine where xfig was started, no matter where the display
is. I.e. you could display the xfig window on a machine which doesn't
have decent fonts at all and it would still work.  And, with some
extra work, it would be possible to embed the exact fonts which were
used on screen into the PostScript output (Because with
Xft2/fontconfig you can ask where the font files used are, you cannot
do this with the X11 core font system).

This would allow you to use many more fonts with xfig, not only the
standard set of PostScript fonts a PostScript printer has to
support. And nevertheless the resulting PostScript files would be
portable and could be printed anywhere because they already contain
the fonts.

All this would need a major redesign of the font stuff in xfig, this
is nothing SuSE can do.

Thank you for the very detailed and full answer - most interesting.

Why not use the "standard" PostScript names for those fonts, via a list of aliases?
Ghostscript does this, no?

Perhaps it would be dodgy putting the foundary name as "adobe" in the fonts, when it isn't (PostScript does not sepecify foundary, X11 can, xfig does), but then the patch would be to wildcard the foundary in xfig?

I guess that Nimbus is now more standard than Times in the Linux world.

Due to license problems the wildcards of e.g.

  -*-times-medium-r-normal--

for Times Adobe do not fit with

  -URW-*Nimbus Roman No9 L-medium-r-normal--

for the Nimbus replacement and

   -*-*-medium-r-normal--

is much to less to catch the correct font.
And yes ghostscript has an alias mapping but this
is more a replacment mapping.

For the next release I've changed the detection
in such way that if the Nimbus fonts are not
installed, the next step is to search for the
Adobe fonts and if this fails the normal fallback
applies.

Eric Varoquaux, on March 2:

I have a recent install of SuSE 10.0, with the URW fonts installed  in
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/URW as well as declared in xorg.conf.

The screen fonts in the implementation of SuSE 10.0 of xfig simply won´t adjust !!
No change of size on the screen at all. The printout seems OK.
Needless to say, xfig is hardly functional with such a bug.

I had other problems with fonts in X applications, particularly with emacs which, out of the box, would not display anything (solved in .Xresources). Most X applications have ridiculously small screen fonts.

My font paths in xorg.conf are as follows:
        FontPath     "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc:unscaled"
        FontPath     "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi:unscaled"
        FontPath     "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi"
        FontPath     "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/"
        FontPath     "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1"
        FontPath     "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi"
        FontPath     "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/truetype/"
        FontPath     "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/URW/"
        FontPath     "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/uni/"

I have tried to install the rpm of the official xfig.org site but there are unresolved dependencies (libpng.so.2). Can anyone suggest a wayout?

Linuxian thanks

Eric

Created attachment 71769 [details]
Other implementation of xfig

I have found a way-out. Install from Mandriva 2006

  transfig-3.2.5-0.2mdk.x86_64.rpm
  xfig-3.2.5-0.2mdk.x86_64.rpm

Copy /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/Xfig and Xfig-color to /etc/X11/app-defaults/

Happy again

Eric