Installing the Greybeard fonts

Please note: these instructions are adapted from the original instructions
included with UW tty0 (and by "adapted" I mean that I basically used a
regex to swap the names around), They may no longer be relevant or they
may be flat-out wrong. I intend to revisit them in the near future.

Ideally, for most modern uses, you should be using one of the provided
modern formats (dfont, ttf)

REQUIREMENTS:

To install Greybeard, you need:

- the standard Unix utilities (sh, cat, rm, install)
- GNU make (this is the default "make" program under Linux, but other
  operating systems may differ)
- perl
- bdftopcf



INSTALLATION:

Step 1: Choose stylistic variants.

  The Greybeard fonts offer stylistic variants for many characters.
  You can, for instance, choose whether you want a regular, a dotted
  or a slashed zero, a raised or a centered tilde, russian, serbian,
  or bulgarian cyrillic characters, and so on.

  Edit the file "VARIANTS.dat" to select your preferred stylistic
  variants. (If you don't, you have to live with the default
  stylistic variants.)

Step 2: Choose sizes and encodings.

  The Greybeard fonts come in nine sizes (from 11px to 22px) and
  three styles (regular, bold, italic), and can be installed for
  more than 30 character encodings ("code pages").

  The default behaviour is to install all sizes, all styles, and
  seven encodings, namely Unicode, ISO 8859-{1,2,7,9,15}, and
  MS Windows CP 1251. If you want more or less combinations,
  edit the file "TARGETS.dat".

Step 3: Compile and install fonts

  The sequence of commands

    $ ./configure [--prefix=PREFIX] [--pcfdir=PCFDIR]
    $ make
    # make install

  compiles and installs Greybeard for X11 (using the pcf.gz format).

  The "--prefix" option is used to specify in which directory tree the
  fonts should be installed; the default PREFIX is /usr/local. If you
  want a private installation in your home directory, rather than a
  global one, use "--pcfdir=$HOME/.fonts" instead. For a full list
  of options, type "./configure --help".

  (Unless you install the fonts in your home directory, "make install"
  must be executed as root.)

Step 4: Troubleshooting

  In an ideal world, everything should work now and this part of the
  installation guide should be empty. Unfortunately, the X11 font system
  is far away from being an ideal world. There are several sources of
  problems. First of all, there is not only one X11 font system, but
  there are two of them: an older, server-based and a newer,
  client-based one. Depending on how the font is installed, it may be
  accessible only to applications that use one of the two font systems;
  so for instance, it may work in an xterm, but not in a KDE konsole.
  Second, in some distributions, bitmap fonts are explicitly disabled in
  order to ensure that the old bitmap versions of fonts like Times or
  Helvetica don't show up in your web browser. You may have to override
  this in order to use Greybeard. Third, it seems that each OS
  distribution and each desktop system offers a standard way to
  configure such things, but of course each one has a different
  standard. There isn't much help at this point -- in most cases, it's a
  good idea to search for "bitmap fonts", "install", and the name of
  your OS distribution, desktop system, or application in your favorite
  search engine.

  Common problems:

  For the older, server-based font system, the fonts either need to be
  installed in a directory of the current font path, or the font path
  has to be extended. The current value of your font path can be
  obtained using "xset q". To extend the font path, the command
  "xset +fp NEW_FONT_DIRECTORY" must be executed after each login (or,
  more precisely, after each restart of the X server).

  The main problem of the newer, client-based font system is that bitmap
  fonts like Greybeard are often explicitly disabled. If there is a file
  /etc/fonts/conf.d/70-no-bitmaps.conf on your system, then they
  probably are disabled. In this case, you can enable Greybeard globally
  by copying the following lines into a file
  /etc/fonts/conf.d/50-enable-greybeard.conf

    <?xml version="1.0"?>
    <!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
    <fontconfig>
      <selectfont>
        <!-- enable Greybeard -->
        <acceptfont>
          <pattern>
            <patelt name="family"><string>Greybeard</string></patelt>
          </pattern>
        </acceptfont>
      </selectfont>
    </fontconfig>

  If you want to (or have to) enable Greybeard just for yourself, check
  first whether there is already a file ".fonts.conf" in your home
  directory. If there is no such file, or if it is empty, copy the lines
  above into ".fonts.conf". If your ".fonts.conf" is non-empty, take
  just the lines from <selectfont> to </selectfont> and insert them
  in ".fonts.conf" after the leading <fontconfig>.

  In both the old and the new font system, you may have to rebuild font
  information cache files after installing Greybeard. The commands are
  "xset fp rehash" and "fc-cache -f".



OTHER INSTALLATION OPTIONS

make bdf
  Produces the generated bdf files for the chosen sizes, styles, and
  encodings, rather than the compressed pcf files.

make install-util
  Installs the "bdfmangle" utility and its manual page in $prefix/bin
  and $prefix/man. Alternative directories can be specified using the
  configure options "--bindir=..." and "--mandir=...". (Installation of
  "bdfmangle" is not necessary to install the Greybeard fonts.)

make clean
  Removes all files generated by "make". (Files generated by "make
  install" are not affected.)

make distclean
  Restores the original content of TARGETS.dat and VARIANTS.dat and
  removes all files generated by "./configure" or "make". (Files
  generated by "make install" are not affected.)

The Greybeard Makefile supports the $(DESTDIR) convention.

