You may get TrueType fonts for TSCII, TAB and
TSCII1.7 encoding from the download section of
http://tamil.homelinux.org/.
Alternate sources for these fonts are
Installing these fonts are either too easy or too
difficult. Too easy if you have one of the latest
distributions, like RedHat7.x or Mandrake7.x. This is because
RedHat (and Mandrake, maybe SuSE) come with
xfs pre-packaged. It is also easy to find
xfs for Debian, but as far as I know,
Debian does not come with xfs
packaged.
5.3.1. Installing TrueType Fonts
You need to run these commands as root. If you are currently
logged in as a normal user, you can use su to
do this now.
You should now have xfs availability,
otherwise use the steps in the previous section to obtain it.
In some distributions like Mandrake, installing
TrueType fonts is a cakewalk. Just go to DrakConf
and use the font install utility - follow a few easy steps there and
you'll have them all.
Put your TrueType fonts in whatever directory you want. For
example, /usr/share/tamiltt.
From within the directory containing your
new fonts, type:
ttmkfdir -m 50 -o fonts.scale
This makes a file that will contain the necessary
information about the fonts for the xfs server. The option
-m 50 specifies the magnification for the fonts;
I have seen some Tamil fonts working well only with
-m 100.
Then type:
mkfontdir
Now you can add the new directory to your
xfs search
path. Red Hat (and Red Hat-like) distributions come with a
neat utility to do this called chkfontpath.
Run chkfontpath like this:
chkfontpath --add /usr/share/tamiltt
This will add the new font directory to your font
path.
(Other users, who have an xfs font
server, without ttf support, can do this by
editing their xfs configuration
file.
If xfs is already installed on
your system, you should see which port it is running on. You can
do this with the following command:
ps ax grep xfs
Then check your XFree86 font path with this
command:
xset -q
If your font path includes something like "unix:/port
number," where port number is the port on which the server
is running, then you already have xfs
set up properly. Otherwise, you should add it to your XFree86
font path with these commands:
xset fp+ <unix/:port number>
xset fp rehash
| The port number is a numerical value, something like
7100. |
You can add the fontpath permanently by editing your
.xinitrc. To add it system-wide,
edit your XF86Config file (either under
/etc/X11/XF86Config,
/etc/X11/XF86Config-4,
/etc/XF86Config, or
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/XF86Config), by
adding the following line to the Files section:
FontPath "unix/:port number"
Here is an example of how it should look:
...
Section Files
...
FontPath "unix/:-1"
...
EndSection
...
|
If xfs is already properly installed,
then you can restart it like this as root:
service xfs restart
After restarting xfs, it is a good
idea to restart your X session.
As most of the users in Tamil will be doing this, let
me summarize the essential steps.
Become root.
Download and copy some ttf fonts into a
directory (say /usr/share/fonts/tamiltt
).
Go to that directory and do a
ttmkfdir -m 50 -o fonts.scale (use the
-m 100 option if your fonts do not budge).
Do a mkfontdir .
(Notice that you need to specify the
directory either absolutely or with a dot).
Do a chkfontpath --add /usr/share/fonts/tamiltt
.
(Remember this command is available only in Red Hat-like
distributions. If you can run this successfully, skip the
remaining steps and restart the X server).
Do ps ax | grep xfs and get
the xfs port known.
Check your font path: xset -q
If your font path includes something like "unix:/port
number", (something like "unix: 7100"), add this
to your xfont path:
xset fp+ unix: port number
xset fp rehash
It is a good idea to restart the X Server.
If everything works fine, update your
.xinitrc file, wherever it is.
Have fun!