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On Tue, 25 Mar 2008, baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org wrote:

> I managed to get all pdf's I tried on the testbed laptop to display using
> Slack4's xpdf, but I'm not having that success with the actual target
> laptop. The pdf's load in in xpdf, but in almost no cases so far is any
> text visible in those pdf's. Looking at terminal output from xpdf, it
> would seem that this is because the program is not finding suitable fonts
> with which to display the documents I'm trying to view. The main question
> I have, then, is why this didn't happen on the testbed laptop.
>
> It could be because I had installed some extra font packages there--the
> ones Steven advised to install to help resolve the web page display
> problems in Opera that I thought were caused by absence of a wide
> selection of fonts. Does the lack of those fonts on the current laptop
> I'm setting up seem like what may be the reason why xpdf does not display
> any text in the documents I'm trying to view with it? Frankly, I'd rater
> not add all those fonts to this system since it messes up rxvt. But maybe
> I'll have to. If so, can I put them someplace where only xpdf will be able
> to find them? Help with this issue will be appreciated.
>
> I did symlink Abiword's font directory to the ghostscript directory that
> Sindi advised about. That didn't seem to have any effect.

The older xpdf probably used the X instead of the gs fonts.

See /usr/local/etc/xpdfrc or ~/.xpdfrc

"X fonts section has been omitted.  This package is designed to use
the included ghostscript fonts instead."

I uploaded my modified xpdfrc to my BL site just now.

The original xpdfrc from xpdf is posted as sample-xpdfrc.

Look at 'display fonts' section.

I have modified it to use fewer serif fonts (just Nimbus rather than also 
Times and Helvetica, which are larger).  This will save hard disk space 
and a bit of memory.  I prefer to see all my text the same font.

Nimbus is n01*.pfb and about 35K for each of four fonts (normal, italic, 
bold, italic-bold, the others a bit larger (45-50K).

Courier (monospaced) is n022*.pfb

To save more space on hard disk you could eliminate italic and bold.

symbols s*.pfb

dingbats d*.pfb

If you get this working you can also use pdftotext from xpdf 3.02 to deal
with later formats.  It uses the same fonts and xpdfrc.

svp uses the gs fonts too.

Sindi

> Thanks,
> James
>
> PS The fonts Steven advised installing from Slack 4 were: xf100, xfcyr,
> xfnon, xfnts, and xfscl.