The K Desktop Environment

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1. Introduction

KFontinst is a TrueType & Type1 font installation & preview program. It will (after an initial setup) configure your system so that TrueType & Type1 fonts maybe used with KDE/X, Ghostscript, StarOffice, and AbiWord (with some slight mods).

It's basically a front end for a few other programs, with some additions/tweeks of its own. These other programs are:

  1. ttmkfdir - Used to create fonts.scale for TrueType fonts.
  2. ttf2pt1 - Used to create .afm files from TrueType fonts. It can also be used to convert TrueType fonts to Type1 fonts, however KFontinst does not use this feature.
  3. afm.pl - A Perl script used to process .afm files so that they are more StarOffice friendly.
  4. type1inst - A Perl script used to create fonts.scale for Type1 fonts.
  5. pf2afm.ps - A Postscript file used to create .afm files for Type1 fonts. If a .afm file (with the same name as the Type1 font) exists in when installing a font, then that .afm file will be copied - and no .afm file will be created.
  6. mkfontdir - Used to create fonts.dir from fonts.scale

Copies of ttmkfdir, ttf2pt1, afm.pl, type1inst, and pf2afm.ps are supplied within KFontinst's archive, and will be installed into <KDE dir>/share/apps/kfontinst/

mkfontdir should already be installed on your system.

If you have later copies, than those included in KFontinst's archive, of any of the programs/scripts mentioned above, then please Email me with the details/location - so that I may include the latest versions in the distribution. Thanks.

Please, do not use this program until you have prepared your system, as described in "Setup"

NOTE 1: Type1 previews are only available if the program has been compiled with t1lib. Also, t1lib is extremely slow at loading a Type1 font if no corresponding .afm file exists.

NOTE 2: I am by no means an expert on fonts under Linux - I just created this program as I hate having to remember lots of cryptic commands just to install a font. Plus I wanted to use my TrueType font collection with StarOffice, and KOffice, and also wanted to be able to access the same character set as I could under Windoze. If you notice any errors, please let me know. Thanks.

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