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On Fri, 28 Mar 2008, baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org wrote:

> On Fri, 28 Mar 2008, Sindi wrote:
>
> > You did not mention you were trying to view non-Latin characters.
>
> Hunh? I mentioned Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac in a recent post. Since when
> do those languages' alphabets qualify as Latin?

You did not mention that you could view English but not Greek.  I thought 
you were not able to view ANY text with xpdf, which implied that xpdfrc 
was pointing to something nonexistent.

kbd.tgz comes with LOTS of console fonts.  Try extracting whatever text
you need to read with pdftotext (from the latest xpdf package that will 
run with your libc) and then load the correct font.  This won't help you 
print (unless you do a screen capture) but you can view.

For one Cyrillic font:

setfont Cyr_a8x16 -u /usr/lib/kbd/consolefonts/u

The last half of this was to get the unicode mapping to work right.

Loading visci (Vietnamese) first I think also worked to get things mapped 
right.  I don't understand why.

I deleted all the fonts from kbd.tgz except the various Latins (Europe W 
and E) and Cyrillic so can't check on Hebrew.  I know it exists, and 
Arabic, and I think Armenian.  You can always make your own fonts (console 
or otherwise) using a font editor.  We made console cp1251 with euro sign.

> > You need to install the ghostscript fonts for whatever language/script you
> > are trying to view.  Abiword for BL comes with only Latin fonts.
>
> Abiword at least has Symbol, which gives me a semblance of Greek. I really
> should have polytonic Greek, though (with diacritical markings and dead
> keys for their placement). But that's a project for another day. Most
> pdf's I will want to view will be almost all in English, and most
> documents I will create will have little or no Greek or Hebrew in them. I
> can always just transliterate, too.

> > It is not terribly complicated to add svgalib and svp as gs frontends.
> > They work with kernel 2.2 (just edit libvga.config from Helper to
> > Nohelper).  My package for svgalib comes with lots of stuff you don't even
> > need (header files for static compilation which I probably did not need to
> > include).  I think you do need libpng12.so.0.16.0 for links2 but probably
> > not to use svp.  You don't need the svgalib_helper module for kernel 2.2.
> >
> > You might need the newer libvga.config but you could try just fetching
> > libvga.so.1.9.25-neo, put in /usr/lib, ldconfig (change the name by
> > removing -neo or symlink it to libvga.so.1.9.25).  Then svp ought to work
> > with any gs.
> >
> > svp-glib225 is my executable.  I don't seem to have packaged it with any
> > documentation.  --help.  26K.
> > libvga.so.1.9.25-neo is 165K
>
> This does not provide a solution to the problem of viewing non-Latin fonts
> though, does it? It would be an alternative to the xpdf set-up I currently
> have, with the same non-Latin limitations I've described, right?

No, it gets around the need to use xpdf or gs under X, and thus lets you 
view pdf 1.7 with the latest gs in BL3.  You still need gs fonts for 
whatever language you are viewing.  You can try to compile svgalib and svp 
and a recent gs for libc5 or uclibc.

> > GS  fonts.htm
> > All about fonts... and how to add new ones.
> > Most gs fonts are .pfb which is PostScript Type 1.  Fontmap file,
> > aliases...
> >
> > See the Hebrew HOWTO.
> >
> > You may have to add your own Hebrew fonts for gs by converting them from
> > some other format, or editing Fontmap.....  Good luck.
>
> Thanks. I did run across some information on that already. It's a project
> I may tackle later, but I'm trying to finish with this initial phase of
> getting all basic functionality set up on the laptop. Getting the
> capability to view or create documents with those non-Latin characters in
> them falls in the category of system tweaking in preparation for any
> conceivable scenario short of all-out nuclear war.

Try console fonts first.  They have been around a long time.
Maybe there is even a console to pfb convertor?

Hebrew HOWTO says X 3.1 comes with two Hebrew fonts heb6x13 and heb8x13.

http://culmus.sourceforge.net/  - Type 1 Hebrew fonts for POSIX

http://www.linuxlinks.com/Software/Utilities/Fonts/

FontED - WYSIWYG console font editor for Linux plus utilities and 
convertors.  ncurses based.

FontForge - postscript font editor

xcyr-fonts - extension to KOI8-R for Belorussian, Macedonian, Serbian, 
Ukrainian (under X).

Look at unicode X fonts.
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs-fonts.html
They have fixed fonts for Armenian, Georgian, Thai, Yiddish, Greek, 
Cyrillic

There are some rpms of Xfree86-syriac-fonts-4.3.0-44.EL.i386.rpm and later 
versions.

Sindi

> James