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<title>Fonts for the Common Desktop Environment (or: How To Alias Your Fonts) LG #88</title>
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<A HREF="http://www.linuxgazette.com/">
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<IMG ALT="LINUX GAZETTE" SRC="../gx/2002/lglogo_200x41.png"
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WIDTH="200" HEIGHT="41" border="0"></A>
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<BR CLEAR="all">
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<SMALL>...<I>making Linux just a little more fun!</I></SMALL>
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<BIG><BIG><STRONG><FONT COLOR="maroon">Fonts for the Common Desktop Environment (or: How To Alias Your Fonts)</FONT></STRONG></BIG></BIG>
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<BR>
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<STRONG>By <A HREF="../authors/jenkins.graham.html">Graham Jenkins</A></STRONG>
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<h2>Yet Another New Desktop Environment?</h2>
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<p>Actually, it's not. The Common Desktop Environment (CDE) has been around
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for as long as some of those who will be reading this article. It was
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jointly developed by IBM, Sun, HP and Novell so as to provide a unified
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"look and feel" to users of their systems. It was also adopted by other
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companies (notably Digital Equipment).
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You can find further details at
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<a href="http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/aix/cde/cdewhat.html">
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"IBM AIX: What is CDE?"</a>.</p>
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<P>
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[<A HREF="misc/jenkins/ScreenShot.jpg">Screenshot: a typical CDE screen</A>]
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<p>The early versions of KDE appear to have been based on CDE, and the
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more recent releases of XFce have a look-and-feel which is very similar
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to that of CDE. A key difference here is that both KDE and XFce are
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Open Source developments.</p>
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<img src="misc/jenkins/FontSize1.jpg" width="480" height="306" border="0"
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align="right" hspace="10" vspace="10" alt="DeskTop Terminal (dtterm)">
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<p>One of the most-used CDE applications is probably its desktop terminal
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'dtterm' which was based on 'xterm' with some extra menu-bar capabilities;
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its look is not unlike that of 'gnome-terminal'. There are also image-viewer,
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performance-monitoring, mail-reader and other useful tools.</p>
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<h2>Why Should I Care?</h2>
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<p>I work in an environment where I am required to access and manage a
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number of Solaris and HP-UX servers. Most of my work is done at a
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NetBSD-based Xterminal, managed by a remote Solaris machine so that I
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have a CDE desktop. There are times it is managed instead by a remote
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Linux machine so that I have a Gnome desktop. And there are times
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(too many of them!) when I work from home, using a Linux machine with
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a locally-managed Gnome desktop.</p>
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<br clear="all">
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<p>It matters little where I am working; as soon as I open up a CDE utility
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such as 'dtterm', my Xserver starts looking for CDE-specific fonts. It seems
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that a number of vendor-supplied backup and other utilities also make use
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of these fonts.</p>
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<img src="misc/jenkins/FontSize2.jpg" width="480" height="306" border="0"
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align="right" hspace="10" vspace="10" alt="DeskTop Terminal without Font Support">
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<p>In the case of 'dtterm' the end-result is that an attempt
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to select a different-sized font produces a selection list containing eight
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fonts, and seven of these can't be found. It is actually possible to get
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around this by redefining on the Solaris or HP host the names of the fonts
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which are used for the 'dtterm' application. This can be done at either a
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system-wide or a user-specific level; either way, it's hardly an elegant
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solution.<p>
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<p>In the case of a splash-screen produced at CDE-login time, the result
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can be quite dire: the user is unable to read the login prompts or error
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messages! More recent versions of both Solaris and HP-UX get around this
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by attempting to append an entry like 'tcp/hpmachine:7100' to the
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font-path at login time. That's fine unless your site security policy
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prohibits the activation of font service on your Solaris and HP servers.</p>
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<h2>Why Not Use Specialised Font Server Machines?</h2>
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<p>You can designate a couple of machines as font-servers for your site. These
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can be small dedicated machines, or they can offer other services (such as
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DHCP, NTP, etc.) as well. That's actually the way that it's done with 'thin'
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Xterminals from companies like IBM, NCD and HP.</p>
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<p>There are several issues. First up, you have to actually install
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the CDE-fonts on the font-server machines; there may be some copyright
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issues here if you are installing (for instance) HP CDE fonts on Linux
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machines.</p>
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<p>Something we noticed in practice is that the Xserver software
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we are using doesn't seem smart enough to do a transparent fail-over in the
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event of a single server disconnection. So what happens is that
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a user suddenly finds himself presented with a blank screen.</p>
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<p>If you are working from home with a modem connection to the LAN
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on which your font-servers reside, it can take some time for required
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fonts to arrive when you start a 'dtterm' application.<p>
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<h2>Install on Every Xserver?</h2>
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<p>This is certainly a possibility, and if you can live with the
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copyright issues, it will solve most of the problems outlined above. But it
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will require an extra 10Mb of filespace on each system.<p>
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<h2>There is Another Way!</h2>
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<p>The good news is that you don't have to lose sleep over the copyright
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issues. And you don't have to install strange fonts all over your
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font directories.</p>
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<p>All you need do is identify some commonly-available fonts which
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closely match the CDE-specific fonts, and create one 'fonts.alias' file.
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Place it in an appropriate directory (e.g. '/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/local'),
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and run 'mkfontdir' in that directory. Then ensure that the directory
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name is included in your font-server configuration
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file (e.g. '/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fs/config'). If your version of Linux
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(or NetBSD, or FreeBSD ..) doesn't include a term like 'unix/:7100'
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in its 'XF86Config' (or similar) server configuration file, you should
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place the name of your selected font directory in that configuration file.</p>
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<h2>The Intimate Details</h2>
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<p>Here's what the 'fonts.alias'
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<a href="misc/jenkins/fonts.alias.txt"> file</a> looks like.
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For clarity, I've shown just the first two and the last alias hereunder, and
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I've broken each line at the whitespace between the alias-name and it's
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corresponding real font. There wasn't a great deal of science went
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into the development of this file, although I did use a couple of
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simple scripts to assemble it. It was just a matter of finding, for each alias,
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a font having similar characteristics and size.</p>
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<pre>
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! XFree86-cdefonts-1.0-2
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! Font Aliases for Common Desktop Environment using XFree86 fonts.
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! Graham Jenkins <grahjenk@au1.ibm.com> October 2001.
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-dt-application-bold-i-normal-serif-11-80-100-100-m-60-iso8859-1
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"-adobe-courier-bold-o-normal--11-80-100-100-m-60-iso8859-1"
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-dt-application-bold-i-normal-serif-14-100-100-100-m-90-iso8859-1
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"-adobe-courier-bold-o-normal--14-100-100-100-m-90-iso8859-1"
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...
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"-dt-interface user-medium-r-normal-xxl serif-21-210-72-72-m-140-hp-roman8"
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"-b&h-lucidatypewriter-medium-r-normal-sans-24-240-75-75-m-140-iso8859-1"
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</pre>
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<h2>Read My Lips</h2>
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<p>OK, so you've read this far, and you're still asking "Why Should I Care?".
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My guess is that eighty percent of you have never used CDE and are unlikely
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to use it in the future.</p>
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<p>But what I can guarantee is that most of you are going to run an application
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one day, and wonder why it's fonts don't display or scale properly. My hope is
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that when that happens, you'll recall what you've read here - and apply it to
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the creation of an appropriate 'fonts.alias' file as outlined above.</p>
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<!-- *** BEGIN author bio *** -->
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<P>
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<P>
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<P>
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<img ALIGN="LEFT" ALT="[picture]" SRC="../gx/2003/authors/Graham_Jenkins.jpg"
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WIDTH="223" HEIGHT="207">
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<em>
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Graham is a Unix Specialist at IBM Global Services, Australia. He lives
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in Melbourne and has
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built and managed many flavors of proprietary and open systems on several
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hardware platforms.
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</em>
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<br CLEAR="all">
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<!-- *** BEGIN copyright *** -->
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<hr>
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<CENTER><SMALL><STRONG>
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Copyright © 2003, Graham Jenkins.
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Copying license <A HREF="../copying.html">http://www.linuxgazette.com/copying.html</A><BR>
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Published in Issue 88 of <i>Linux Gazette</i>, March 2003
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</STRONG></SMALL></CENTER>
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