Fonts
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Introduction
Update: Since wine 0.9.59, wine has prebuilt fonts included. J. McKenzie noted Feb 09: Wine will only recognize True Type fonts for now.[But you can convert to true type fonts]
D. Timoshkov in Winehq Bugzilla entry 18349 May 09 The point is that Wine neither renders fonts (Freetype does that), nor provides CJK fonts. So the problem with fonts quality is outside of Wine. He also noted in Winehq Bugzilla entry 18971 [as of jul 09] The Wine fonts get installed to /usr/share/wine/fonts [..] The .fon files are already just the resource "placeholders". Alexandre didn't like the idea to have .fon files under windows/fonts, since they are installed in the shared system place.
Both using Freetype with enabled TT bytecode interpreter, and installing Windows CJK fonts will get that 2 things more close to Windows. Although as I said many times even Freetype with enabled TT bytecode interpreter doesn't work very well sometimes, especially with so complex fonts as the CJK ones are.
Wine apparently checks the windows/fonts directory, and uses it for all the fonts in the programs it loads. If there are no fonts in this directory wine assumes that you want to use the xwindows fonts. When there are fonts in this directory wine assumes you want to use the windows/fonts fonts and not the xwindows fonts.
What this means is... if you have no fonts in the windows directory and your latest software install copies some strange and unusual font to the windows directory, suddenly all the text may look quite strange. This is easily fixed - copy the corefonts to the font directory and then wine will be able to select a better font.
A User noted [May 06]: the SuSE RPM for 0.9.8 has the fonts in /usr/share/fonts/wine/ and the 0.9.12 version in /usr/share/wine/fonts/. D. Clark: This location changed fairly recently (a few months ago, as I recall). [wine archive] [...] If there are no fonts available in any of the places Wine knows to look,then it falls back to using the XFS server fonts (which is serving the fonts for normal X/Linux programs). In that case, Wine builds a font cache of the fonts provided by XFS. As long as Wine finds a least one font in one of the normal directories it knows about, it will not build/use the cache.
Paul: Between 0.9.8 and 0.9.12 the font handling in wine has been overhauled. Before it used the wrong but available fonts for defaults. Now it uses the correct but hard to build fonts.
Fontforge Dependancy
If Bug [12344] A wine developer [April 08] We shouldn't bother with fontforge versions anymore, wine tree now contains pre-built fonts.
M.McCormack [Apr 06]: Wine's build time dependency on FontForge is causing a bit of a problem, as can be seen by browsing the wine-devel archives for the last month. I propose that a small sfd2ttf utility be written and used instead of FontForge to eliminate the dependency, and make everybody a little happier.
George Williams, the author of FontForge, is happy for us to use his code under LGPL, providing that we give the correct attributions. He'd probably like to sign off on the final code though. Alexandre agrees with the idea of an sfd2ttf utility, and is likely to accept it into the Wine tree, provided that is small enough (read 1/2 files) and is appropriately cut down.
B. Vincent: it'd be really nice to have the fonts available rather than just warn someone they won't be. [We only need] parsing sfd files and generating a TTF from them.
One person asked: why can't we just distribute the ttf files directly?
B. Vincent: as a general rule of thumb the source code releases are just that - source code. The proper solution is to distribute the .sfd files and compile them during the build process.
M. McCormack: We're also discovered that not all versions of FontForge are equal, and that's not easy to detect in configure. We have [a warning in configure] now. People can't read :) I suspect it also has to do with people configuring Wine like this:
- ./con figure && make
which means any configure warnings will most likely be missed. We can try go a step further and pass a non-zero exit code to the shell, so the above fails. The task is to take some of the FontForge code, turn it into a sfd2ttf and make it acceptable for inclusion into Wine.
N0dalus: I guess the easiest way to do this is to run the program through gcov and work out which code gets used and what doesn't in the process of converting the fonts. wine archive
While this problem is being worked on, Segin posted [Apr 06]:the minimum required Fontforge needed to build Wine. Treat it as third-party documentation.
- Versions of Wine up to 0.9.10 need fontforge-20050624; Never use anything older.
- Versions 0.9.11 and 0.9.12 require something newer. Try fontforge-20060408 on for size. wine archive
New Fonts for Wine
M.McCormack:Wine can compile fonts from the sfd files produced by FontForge, so if we built our own symbol.ttf we wouldn't need to copy symbol.ttf from Windows. If somebody is interested in kicking off a Symbol font (just adding a beta symbol would help Tobias) then grab font forge from http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/ and have a look in wine/fonts.
V. Lipatov indicated his plans for some new font files : [Mar 2006] I wish to make a initial font file for Wingdings and Symbol fonts. Do anyone some font designing already? I plan to draw some common usable symbols for first. wine archive
Making new or replacement fonts
A developer posted [Apr 06] I played around a bit with fontforge and a basically i think i get how to create fonts, and add them to wine. [...] Anyone could help me with a quick (and clear) HOWTO ?
B. Vincent: Why not look for a replacement someone else has already done and ask permission for usage?
J. Zerebecki: Reactos had a Tahoma replacement in the works, called "Greenville" by Wierd Wierd [redacted] http://www.reactos.org/wiki/index.php/Wierd_W ). (Comments on his work: "he was doing a really good job too"; "very distinctive look".) He seems to have stopped working on it, because neither hinting (the patented thing) nor as a fallback embedded bitmaps worked correctly / good enough. It seems that there is a freetype problem remaining with subpixel rendering (see that linked wiki page for more info). It looks as if he has the font ready, so perhaps someone should ask him nicely if he releases that font. I guess fixing that freetype problem would help, thu perhaps not easy. Another problem might be that he didn't use fontforge to create the font, but some comercial, expensive tool. So we wouldn't be able to "build" the font from source.
A developer asked: Anyone know the legal ramifications of tracing glyphs? It's alluded to on fontforge's web page.
Another replied: I guess tracing glyphs should be avoided as it could be seen as copying. More so because we don't need a replacement font to look that similar.
M. Glibic: well, you know what you should probably do? http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page nice, gpl fonts with kazillion international chars. some have similar look. find a way to substitute tahoma with dejavu and youre set. probably looks much better too. if not good enough, fork it and make it even more similar :) wine archive
Red Hat Liberation Fonts
D. Kegel [Wine devel May 25 2007]: Red Hat's Liberation font is a single-source thing done by a pro,[...] it would be better to have Wine install the fonts by default once they are proven useful, I think. I added them to winetricks so people could experiment with them (slightly) more easily.
M. Cox: i was hoping that the font names could be remapped/hacked so that the names of the mscorefonts map to the redhat fonts. If that is successful, the fonts could be included in wine and we wouldn't need mscorefonts anymore.
H Leidekker: yes, we should be able to eliminate a number of font related bugs by shipping with these fonts. Apps like Picasa [1] appear to ask for a specific font name, others even reference the font file directly. There's another bug where if an app installs the first truetype font in Wine all subsequent text is shown with that font [2]. These bugs can be worked around by installing corefonts.
the discussion continued... however in Aug 07 A. Julliard commented that they could not be included in the source for wine: No, it can't be included, the fonts are GPL not LGPL, and you don't want to silently insert them into the Wine binary packages.
Further Reading
Wine Built Fonts
[Dec 09] Wine built-in fonts don't have Persian (and many others) characters[..] [ you may want to use a font with the glyphs present for the language you use, however you could help wine and submit some..] Winehq Bugzilla entry 21036
[Oct 06] I noticed wine-0.9.23 builds 5 fonts, but the only one that gets installed is marlett. Why aren't the other fonts getting installed? Did someone just forget to add them to the makefile?
H. Davies: No, the other four are intermediate steps in generating the bitmap fonts. wine archive
V. Margolen [Jan 2007 comment on bug 7146]: Wine has it's own "MS Sans Serif" which is .FON
Tahoma
A user reported a problem with wine's new Tahoma font: This makes Wine's text unreadable for me: If I remove the new tahoma.tff file, it looks fine [and posted a screenshot]
H. Davies [wine devel oct 07: Nice ;-/ The new Tahoma doesn't contain any TrueType hinting instructions, so there are several sets of bitmaps that get used at small font sizes. It's possible winecfg is trying to use a font size for which we don't have a bitmap strike. Could you send me a +font log so that I could take a look?
Installing Windows Fonts
Probably the best method is to use Dan Kegel's Winetricks script.
G. Peregud demonstrated how to download and install the Arial font (The "/Q" switch for the font installation skips all the dialogs):
cd /home/[username]/.wine/drive_c/ w get http://switch.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/corefonts/arial32.exe wine arial32.exe /Q
Or use any other mirror from http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/corefonts/arial32.exe?download
H. Bostick: If you have Windows installed somewhere, you can copy the fonts and dump them in Wine's fonts folder. I have the open-source versions of the MS files installed as the 'corefonts' package -- if you do as well, you can
1) copy the fonts to Wine's font folder [Or]
2) edit the Wine config to point to the directory where the fonts live (/usr/share/fonts/corefonts), using either the config file (if you have one), or the Registry-- you should be able to do this with Wine's regedit, meaning Wine's regedit works for this purpose, [...] I can't tell you what reg file it's in [... Since June 2005](all of the config settings were moved to the Registry, [...] and winecfg does not handle this). Wine Archive
Font Hinting
[Oct 05 from the wine weekly news] Wine now has hinting of fonts within Wine. Since Apple holds patents on that process (the Freetype website has a good description of the problem.) CodeWeavers can use this with CrossOver Office as they've licensed the technology from Apple. Within Wine it just causes problems unless you've compiled Freetype yourself and enabled hinting, which practically no one does. Mike Hearn explained the issue:
There is a serious problem with Wine 0.9 as-is, namely that we now respect Windows antialiasing settings.
If you have a patented bytecode hinter enabled FreeType, things look OK: winedesktop jpeg
but if you don't (like 99% of Linux users): http://www.republika.pl/belegdol/temp/wine.png
Huw Davies then put two small patches together to fix the problem:
- fonts: GetRasterizerCaps hinter enabled flag
- Add a Wine specific flag to GetRasterizeCaps that reports whether freetype's patented hinter is enabled. This will be used by winex11 to check whether it should honour the gasp table settings.
- fonts: ignore the gasp table when we have no hinter
Further Reading
Sub Pixel Font Rendering
A user asked [Jan08]: The announcement for Wine 1.1.12 says that support for subpixel font rendering has been added. The question is, how can we use it? Is there a way to enable it globally? (there's no such setting in winecfg)
Vitamin: It will be used automatically if your FreeType lib supports it.
The user tried Liberation Sans, DejaVu Sans, and others - all are aliased. Vitamin: See this bug: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16729 There are some registry changes you need to make.
One person posted in Wineuser Wed Jan 09 :You have to put the following code into a file and import it into the registry:
- [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop] "FontSmoothing"="2"
- "FontSmoothingType"=dword:00000002
- "FontSmoothingGamma"=dword:00000578
- "FontSmoothingOrientation"=dword:0000000
A user asked why this was not the default and hasi posted: I think comment #4 in bug 16729 provides an explanation. It's simply not been updated yet: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16729
Perhaps by the time you update wine it will automatically work. However one user wrote about it not working even with the registry changes. Vitamin wrote: Then your FreeType lib has fonts subpixel rendering disabled. [No further solution was posted.]
Converting Fonts
Type1 Fonts
Dag Wieers reported using Framemaker had difficulties with Wine and Adobe Type1 fonts working together: I finally decided to convert my Type1 fonts to Truetype[...]
Framemaker actually has a hidden feature to find out which fonts are missing. When you load your FrameMaker document and you have missing fonts, it wants to reformat your file. After you allow that, just look at the available fonts, suddenly you have a few extra ones in the list that have been disabled. These are the fonts FrameMaker requires and couldn't find. Open them in fontforge (http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/), if necessary change the Family Name to what you wrote down and safe it as a Truetype font. If you do that for all the files involved, everything works fine. I added this explanation to my document bits (for google) http://dag.wieers.com/howto/bits/wine-framemaker-type1.php
A wine user asked if fontforge should be part of the Font HOWTO and maybe something about Wine and Type1 support (and FrameMaker) too ?Wine Archives
Bit-mapped fonts (i.e. *.fon)
Unlike the truetype fonts which can be just copied across to the wine font directory, G. Harris points out: the bit-mapped fonts from Windows (i.e. *.fon) are not going to be handled under Wine just by copying the files or checking a configuration setting. It will take more effort than the vector fonts (TrueType and Postscript) that are sufficient for most applications.
See http://www.winehq.org/site/docs/wine-user/config-fonts-main
Having not done this myself in a long time, I can't tell you whether the documentation is still accurate or those procedures will work. Wine Archive
In April 06 after a problem with wine and fonts eventually a developer offered some code for wine from fontforge to convert fonts. A. Juliard doesnt allow binary files in CVS so the binary font is not accepted. Work progressed on getting this effort into wine.
One post noted: The fonts aren't generated properly for me unfortunately. I am opening them in gnome-font-viewer; there is a screenshot attached.
M. Amsler: Courier.sfd is a bitmap font, perhaps that's the problem. Try marlett.sfd,it's an outline font.
Another noted a problem should the MS Tahoma replacement "Greenville" be added to wine: we need to include the ttf anyway as there is no source or perhaps only one usable with a nonfree as in money tool.
M. Amsler: Fontforge can convert ttf files to sfd.wine archive
Far East Languages
A User asked about Font Linking and Far East Languages with Wine and Winecfg [July 05]: Currently, It seems that "MS Shell Dlg" is mapped to "Tahoma" in wine.(in tools/wine.inf) [and then wondered if] we have to specify "MS UI Gothic" in Japanese resources to prevent font corruptions.
R. Shearman: Font linking is where the GDI character drawing functions look at the font and see that the specified character is not present in the font and automatically load another font to use instead of drawing the square that you would have previously have seen. Mapping MS Shell Dlg to MS UI Gothic at runtime requires font linking to be implemented, and it isn't in Wine, so we need to specify the font manually for Far East languages (Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese). Wine Archive
For non unicode applications you can set the locale.
D. Timoshkov [July 2007 wine bug 8915]: Wine sets its internal locale based on the locale settings in the underlying system. So, if your locale is not set to chinese this bug is invalid. Try for intance running your app using command line below:
- LANG=zh_CN wine program.exe
[sometimes you just need to install a font as one post in wineuser aug 08 reported:i found another way to view the traditional chinese on the app.
- install darwine
- copy pmingliu.ttf to your darwine fonts folder, which is under .wine/drive_c/windows/Fonts
CJK Fonts
Winehq Bugzilla entry 11281 has resulted in a few fixes. P. Hampson noted: If the text is ugly, it's because your font replacements are wrong ... Distributions should be able to pre-seed "HKLU\\Software\\Wine\\Fonts\\Replacements" via wine.inf effectively renaming distribution-provided fonts into the expected MS UI font names: MS UI Gothic, MS Serif, SimSun, NSimSun, Gulim, Batang, PMingLiU, MingLiU is the current list of expected fonts for East-Asian locales. Picking metric-compatible fonts is left as an exercise for the packager. [...] simply modifying wine.inf in the package to put values in to HKLU\\Software\\Wine\\Fonts\\Replacements (as per comment 9 and http://wiki.winehq.org/UsefulRegistryKeys) would probably be sufficient. The Fonts section of wine.inf looks appropriate, add entries like: HKCU,Software\Wine\Fonts\Replacements,"MS UI Gothic",,"IPAMonaUIGothic" for each of the fonts listed in comment 9 for which you depend on (or recommend, or whatever your package management system does) a reasonable substitute. This way if a user drops an actual font into place with that name, it will be used by preference.
Troubleshooting Fonts
Broken Font handling
M. Meissner: SUSE Linux 10.1 contains fontconfig 2.3.94, which changed the FcPatternGetString() function from return path names to return only the filenames. We received this bugreport: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=179457
However, Bernd Rosenkraenzer reported this problem already and the change was reverted for fontconfig 2.3.95. Its just that it might be broken only in SL 10.1 (perhaps fixed with online update, still in discussion). So this is just a heads-up, if more bugreports should appear. wine archive
Fonts without bold or itallics
D. Timoskov [Oct 09] That's because GDI in Wine doesn't simulate bold and italic for bitmap fonts. Winehq Bugzilla entry 7520
Invisible Fonts
[April 06] I am no longer able to see fonts in: the GTA installer - for example on the intial screen ("What language to use?") [and] Steam (*with* Tahoma previously installed and working). When selecting menus fonts will flash quickly making the menu visible, and then disappear. In addition, when re-creating a new clean wine root, I also lose the ability to see fonts in winecfg. This is Wine 0.9.11 on Fedora Rawhide x86_64. There is no error output. The Steam problem was in the last release as well. What should I do to track down the problem?
T. Rollo: The problem is due to an old version of fontforge. In Debian, version 0.0.20041218-0.1 generates incorrect ascent information for the Windows font header. Version 0.0.20051205-0.1 gets it right. For Debian users, 0.0.20051205-0.1 is only available in testing and higher. Unfortunately 0.0.20051205-0.1 depends on other things from testing (such as libc6 >= 2.3.5-1), so if you want to build on a pure Sarge system you will need to either do without fontforge, build it yourself, or find a backport somewhere.
J. Zerebecki: http://www.backports.org/ has it.
The user reported: I have fontforge-20060125-6.fc5 installed. I also have every other font under the sun installed, as this is an "everything" install. Removing or moving /usr/share/wine/fonts causes wine to refuse to generate .wine, and start up. In order for that to work, it seems wine requires the directory to exist, and for there to be at least one file in it (/usr/share/wine/fonts/* exists). Making a bogus file in there makes it work. I can see fonts in winecfg, and fonts in the GTA installer in a newly created wine root. I haven't yet tried to install Steam in there. Using my old wine root, Steam still does not work. Otoh the GTA works with the old root. wine archive
Another user [April 06] noted: text of most richedit objects started displaying as rectangles since around Wine 0.9.9, and now, with current CVS, no text is displayed in applications witht the standard Windows interface (like winecfg, wordpad, message boxes etc.) on some systems.
V. Margolen:
- You need fontforge.
- You need _working_ fontforge.
- You need Wine's fonts made with working fontforge.
Same thing for freetype.
The user asked: wasn't the FontForge stuff introduced before 0.9.11? Compiling and running 0.9.11 works fine, but doing the same for CVS does not.
T. Carnecky: I had the same problem. You need a newer fontforge, mine was from 2005???? (from the official gentoo portage tree) and updating to 200604?? solved the problem. [...] At least now this information is in the README file, I saw the patch just after I've sent that email :)
During the resulting discussion H. Davies queried: Does 'make test' in dlls/gdi pass as well?
E. Pouch noted: The test fails if you have some other fonts installed.
D. Timoshkov commented: I think that's expected, running tests with native libraries (and the fonts are the libraries) is not guaranteed to pass due to font substitution. [Further discussion resulted...] wine archive
[April 07] If you still have the issue of invisible fonts (using Wine 0.9.34), then you will maybe notice when you open a .fon file with fontforge that all entries are blank. In this case just copy the .fon files from your original Windows CD into your ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/fonts/ directory and the problem should be fixed.
Blank boxes
Another user had a problem with a font [Sept 06]: My one win app that makes me a devotee of WINE [...]has a custom font , tef260.ttf, that has failed to display since somewhere after ver 9.6. The program installs the font into c:\windows\font, but can not display it within the program, instead displaying for the most part, empty squares. [...]The only way I got it to display was to remove ALL fonts from [/usr/local/share/wine/fonts, /usr/local/share/fonts, and the wine windows/fonts directories] and install tef260.ttf into an X11 font directory along with other win ttf fonts. This forces WINE to build a cachedmetrics file like it used to, and the font is displayed properly in the program. wine archive
Font Substitution and Replacement
T. Lambreghts [Apr 06] when considering recent bug reports with wine's fonts appearing too big: Should we consider using native fonts a "FIX" or is it just a workaround? Or in other words can we fix our built in fonts to fix this.
S. Edwards: We really need a proper font replacement.
H. Davies: MS Shell Dlg maps to either Microsoft Sans Serif or Tahoma depending on Windows version; the default wine.inf maps it to Tahoma so you should check whether you have tahoma.ttf installed. If in doubt a +font log will tell you what Wine picks for this font. [...] it [looks] like we should be using Microsoft Sans Serif for MS Shell Dlg at least for non-CJK locales. wine archive
Marlett font needed for Steam
A Programmer noted [Jun 05] The "Wine Marlett" font needs to be called "Marlett" for Steam to pick it up. The font replacement mechanism should make this unnecessary. Why doesn't that work in this case? It enumerates the fonts, but Marlett isn't enumerated, only "Wine Marlett." I tried adding a value in the FontSubstitutes and Fonts registry keys and the problem was the same. You can test this very easily using notepad's Edit->Font dialog. Steam only started working when Marlett was listed as a font in there.
H. Davies: that's the fonts substitutes mechanism which is different from the replacements one<g> See LoadReplaceList in gdi/freetype.c You need something like this [in your Wine Registry: a String Value "Marlett" and add "Wine Marlett" as the data] :
- [HKCU\Software\Wine\Fonts\Replacements]
- "Marlett"="Wine Marlett"
P. Vriens noted [July 05] that using Marlett gets the 'Minimize','Maximize' and 'Close' symbols to show nicely Wine Archive
H. Davies: It would be nice to have the Windows fonts overload the Wine ones if they're present, which is what the current scheme does. Now, for TrueType fonts we could set the version low enough such that the Windows fonts would win, but there's no version associated with a .fon font so we couldn't use that trick there.
A. Julliard: Can't this be based on the font path, using the first font we find in the path? Then we just have to make sure the Windows dir is searched first.
H. Davies: That would work if the Wine fonts end up in the Windows dir, but aren't they likely to get installed into somewhere under /usr/share/fonts ?
A. Julliard: Well, yes, the idea would be to search the Windows dir before /usr/share/fonts. [...] for fonts that have versions the priority can be based on that. First come first serve would only be for fonts that can't be versioned.
H. Davies: I like the versioning thing, it lets me have the ms webfonts under /usr/share/fonts and have /win/winnt/fonts in my fontconfig path. This way, if my Windows partition has a newer version of Arial than the ms webfonts I get to use that, rather than it being on a first come first serve basis. [...] Sorry, I misread this. So in order to have sserife.fon beat wine_sserife.fon I'd have to copy it into my Windows dir? I'd like this to happen automatically if sserife.fon existed in my fontconfig path. (Yes, I know it won't at the moment because we ignore all bitmap fonts in the fontconfig path, but I think this should be changed to let .fon bitmap through). [...] Can't we just add the Replacement keys to wine.inf and be done with it?
A. Julliard: Yes, but that's ugly, Wine should be able to behave sanely without special registry entries.Wine Archive
Further Reading
Rotated Text non visible
A user reported: [Feb 06] I noticed a strange behavior of the Font/Vector objects functionality of Corel Draw on diffrent SuSE 10 Systems. On one system Rotated Text works fine (without any failure) on a other system, rotated fonts became invisible on the screen. At pdf export, the fonts are normally visible. So it seems to be a graphics subsystem error. No winedebug output at all. Can somebody tell me which system libraries used for the font rendering functions? So that I can compare the two systems to find out where the font-rendering error cames from. wine archive
M. Meissner: Its using freetype2, libXft and libXrender. It might also depend on what truetype fonts you have installed.
H. Davies: s/libXft/fontconfig/ and yes, if you don't have any ttf fonts installed on one platform it may be reverting back to XServer font rendering.
Small Fonts
Some resolutions leave fonts too small. Use winecfg to change the dpi. If you changed the dpi in winecfg and made it too small to fix it you can edit the registry. vitamin Mar 08: [the file is ] ~/.wine/system.reg:
Code: [System\\CurrentControlSet\\Hardware Profiles\\Current\\Software\\Fonts] "LogPixels"=dword:00000060
That "00000060" is actual in hex - 0x60 = 96. You want to set it to 120 =0x78: [ie] "LogPixels"=dword:00000078
D. Kegel added: determine dots per inch (dpi) by dividing the number of pixels by the appropriate inch range on your screen. For instance: I have two computers, a MacBook Pro which has a 16:9 screen size of 15" on the diagonal. The actual screen size is 12 X 8 (approximately), my screen is set to 1440x960. So if I do the math, my dpi is 120. However, my IBM A22p is also 15" but in 4:3 format so the actual dpi is 133. So the number entered is different for the two systems. I would accept 120 (0x78) as a good estimate and it is much better than 96 dpi (which would be true on a 15" monitor running 640x480 or 800x600 but not 1024x768. This should eliminate the 'small fonts' problem and is what Windows actually does to make displayed fonts larger.
A problem with very small fonts was reported [Jan 06].
David: Try deleting some of the .TTF files. For a while Wine programs were all coming up with an Arabic font for me, until I deleted the offending file. wine archive
Large Fonts
T. Rollo: Rendering text to a screen DC with a font height on the order of 17,000 pixels results in glyphs being uploaded to the X server that are on the order of 30MB in size (or more for some wide characters). The next attempt to make a request of the server results in a SIGPIPE. This is possible if an app has the ability to zoom in on a document containing text and allows the user to specify the scaling factor without limiting it. Very large screen fonts can also arise when some WYSIWYG display strategies are used, although this would not ordinarily get to the 17,000 pixel range. Windows deals with such behaviour without problems. I'm not sure there's anything that can be done about this other than imposing an arbitrary sanity check on the size of the screen font prior to uploading the glyph - if the font is much larger than the screen, for instance, then perhaps the best thing is just not to upload the glyph but mark it internally as having been uploaded. Presumably that will prevent the loss of connection without breaking WYSIWYG display strategies that involve calculating positions using large fonts in a screen DC. wine archive
Unusual Charactors
A user posted to the list [dec 05] that instead of the '/' charactor he was seeing something like an ugly W on death row.. Can anyone tell me how I can look at a particular ttf file and see what characters are in it (so that I can see if it has a \ that looks like a W)
B. Medland : Actually it was enough to open an OpenOffice document and play in there. [...]And yes, [for the particular font] the \ is actually painted as a W with two lines through it.
Can anyone tell me how, given a font (selected through xfontsel), I can find out what is implementing it (e.g. which ttf file it is in).
B. Medland: what I did, for anyone else having similar problems, was override the FontSubstitutes registry entries to select the best font that I could use (Bitstream Vera Sans) for everything. wine archive
Forcing FontSubstitutes
Anon Feb 06: Everything was showing up in an Indian font, since that appeared first in the list of fonts. I used the following FontSubstitutes to fix it [using wine regedit to access this in the wine registry]:
[Software\\Microsoft\\Windows NT\\CurrentVersion\\FontSubstitutes] 1105370265 "Helv"="Sans" "Helvetica"="Sans" "Microsoft Sans Serif"="Sans" "MS Sans Serif"="Sans" "MS Shell Dlg"="Sans" "MS Shell Dlg 2"="Sans" "Tahoma"="Sans"
"Sans" is a useful font, because it will be set to your desktop's default sans-serif font—Bitstream Vera Sans, in my case.
