What the font !

 The last couple days, I've been working with fonts. So you can bet the next couple posts to the blog will be about , you guessed it , FONTS ! Not the most exciting topic but if you do a lot of design work , fonts may be of interest to you. If you don't do a lot of design work or change around fonts at all, then these next few posts will probably be pretty boring. In advance, sorry !

Doing some artwork for a customer the other day I thought it was a good time to upgrade and expand my font library. I just couldn't find the right font for the job. So I stopped everything, and started looking around for a font library I could purchase. Because this was a commercial job I wanted a font pack that was commercial use, and if possible royalty free so I could use it on multiple jobs.

I did a little research on font management using GNU/Linux, downloaded a new font manager, more on that in another post, and started searching for a new font pack. I went to Amazon and found this package 5000 fonts. It was just what I wanted and only $29.99. Perfect.

The package was available for digital download, and I was a little concerned about the format the package would be delivered in. Amazon didn't give any information about the file itself, ie; zip, rar, etc... So I figured I'd take a chance, worst case scenario, I download the package, if it's an executable .exe I'll open it on a friends computer, extract the fonts I want and then leave the file in my ftp server for safe keeping and further use down the road. 

Amazon unfortunately decided to use a Windows or Mac only downloader. WTF, I just want to download the file, by all that's holy and unholy why would you do such a thing ? Wwwhhhyy ? I couldn't even download the file. So I then called Amazon, told them of my plight, and the customer service rep instantly  refunded my money.

The strangest thing about this story is that according to the Amazon customer service rep I spoke with, the customer service department uses Ubuntu. The customer service rep said they can't even use half of Amazons services , and didn't understand why the company wouldn't make the website more Linux friendly.

Now, I can't watch movies on Amazon, and I can't participate in digital downloads. That really sux because I spend a lot of money on their site. Hopefully they make the sight more Linux friendly in the future. 

With that said, I'm on a mission today for commercial use font packs that are Linux friendly. I'll be posting my results, along with a little information on the new font manager I downloaded.  I guess the moral of this story is , if your looking to use the Amazon digital download service for software, and what not, you're not going to be doing it with a Linux machine !

On a final note, if anyone has any suggestions on where to download some decent commercial use fonts, please feel free to comment.

Fontconfig warning: "/etc/fonts/conf.d/50-user.conf", line 9: reading configurations from ~/.fonts.conf is deprecated.

Installed some fonts the other night in the new Fedora 18 KDE, and today when I went to load kcharselect from terminal I got this message.

Fontconfig warning: "/etc/fonts/conf.d/50-user.conf", line 9: reading configurations from ~/.fonts.conf is deprecated.

I did a bit of Googling and it seems to be a common problem across many distros. I found this in an Ubuntu forum and it seemed to take the problem away.

mkdir .config/fontconfig

mv .fonts.conf .config/fontconfig/fonts.conf

When I ran the mkdir command, it said I already had the proper directory, so I ran the second command and everything seems to work fine since. I downloaded my favorite set of dingbats and they installed fine. Made this real quick to test them out.

Punk dingbats font downloaded at. http://fontzzz.com/font/13093_punk_dingbats.htm

My First Linux Setback Installing Fonts For Gimp

Small setback while doing some graphics work last night. Working in Gimp creating some graphics, I decided I wanted a different font. I went to my favorite font site, selected some cute fonts for some Easter designs I was doing, and went to install them. O.k. how do I install fonts in Linux.

I did a quick search and found several different ways to install fonts for several different distros. I followed the instructions for a Fedora install and failed. I ended up installing them in the wrong directory, my fault and no big deal. I then went to the Gimp website and installed them using the instructions found there. Again, this wasn't a big deal, but what should of took 5 to 10 minutes tops, turned into a 1 hour fiasco that I really could of done without.

The worst part is I did this once before successfully and that's one of the reasons I created this blog. If I would of noted it in the blog I could of just looked it up here, and saved myself a lot of time.

So how did I install the fonts ? Hopefully this helps someone. I followed the instructions for installing fonts for Gimp. The tutorial can be found here. I used the local setup and Gimp uses fontconfig to install the fonts. So any fonts installed for Gimp should be found by the other programs you use. The worst part of my fiasco is that I think Fedora already has this setup in the users home directory. So if your using Fedora you should simply be able to go to /home/yourusername/.fonts directory, unzip your fonts and copy them into the .fonts directory and Fedora should do the rest for you. Here's the process I used.

From konsole type
cd /home/your_user-name_here/
using the ls command type:
ls -a
The ls command will list all the contents of the directory, the -a will show you all hidden files and directories. Make sure you have a .fonts directory, and if you do, just go to the directory where you unzipped your fonts and then just use the mv command to move them.
mv fontname.ttf /home/your_user-name_here/.fonts
Fedora should do the rest. Open and close Gimp and your new fonts should be there waiting for you.

Using dolphin, just go to your home directory, click on Control, check show hidden files, find the .fonts folder, and copy and paste your fonts there. Again Fedora should do the rest.

The process explained will configure the fonts for the local user only, and not system wide. This will only work if fontconfig came preconfigured in your distro. If not you will have to read your manual and setup fontconfig.