Baslinux mailing list

[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

On Wed, 17 May 2006 3aoo-cvfd AT dea.spamcon.org wrote:

> sindi keesan wrote:
> > Have you got Slackware 4.0 xpdf working in BL3?
>
> Yes.  I needed to add the xfnts package and another
> package -- don't remember which -- maybe elflibs?
> ldd will tell you what's missing.

I looked in the xpdf*.tar.gz packages and there is a 
/usr/local/etc/sample-xpdfrc file which I had copied to xpdfrc. It 
contains something like fonts.alias, and one possible source of fonts 
'standard X server fonts'.  A second possibility is the ghostscript fonts. 
GS 5.10 has 4MB of fonts. xpdf uses fonts starting in n0 (courier, 
helvetica and times?), s (symbol), and d (dingbat).  I copied over from 
BL2 all the n0* d0* and s0* files.  I may only need the ones ending in 
.pfb, and listed in xpdfrc.

They have examples of default mappings.  Here is the one for ghostscript 
fonts:

'These map the Base-14 fonts to the Type 1 fonts that ship with 
ghostscript'.
#displayFontT1 Times-Roman /usr/local/share/ghostscript/fonts/n021031.pfb
(more for italic, bold, and bold-italic, which I could map all to plain, 
and for Helvetica and Courier 4 each, and I could map all 12 of these to 
n0210031.pfb.  The pfb files are about 33-40K each and I think I could 
manage with one courier file, one symbol and one dingbat (or probably no 
dingbat, point it at courier instead).

I copied over all 610K of all the n0 s0 and d0 .pfb files for a quick 
experiment. There are 16 of the character files so I could delete four of 
them (lucida?) leaving 4 each for times, helvetica and courier.  Or I 
could reduce this to 1 instead of 16 or 12 files, of about 35K (non bold 
and non italic).  But I have 600K free space on the laptop hard disks, 
which is a lot better than 4MB of ALL the ghostscript fonts or 1.4MB of 
xfnts.tgz (of which 1.1M is 75dpi - does 100 dpi look better?)

pdftoppm now works.  It goes much faster with -mono -r 75 than the default 
color 150 resolution.  I don't know if 16MB RAM could handle higher 
resolution in real time (and with 16MB swap file).

The 75dpi files appear to come in sets of 6 .pcf.gz files of 5-6K each, 
rather than one uncompressed file of 33-40K as in ghostscript.  I could 
not identify which were dingbat, as I could for ghostscript (d0).

Are the X fonts optimized for screen viewing and the ghostscript files for 
legibility printed?  Lucida is a screen font - I might try to point xpdfrc 
at that.

This was much more interesting than installing a complete fonts package.


 >> opera (but there is no way to enlarge the window
> > to fill the screen without a window manager)
>
> opera -geometry 800x600

Thanks.  But running without a window manager also forces me to use the 
mouse to change focus.  I dont' think swm would help in that respect.

> Cheers,
> Steven