[vox-tech] Debian help: font problems

[Peter Jay Salzman]

On Sat 24 Apr 04, 12:19 PM, Ken Herron <kherron+lugod@fmailbox.com> said:
> --On Saturday, April 24, 2004 10:00:09 AM -0700 Peter Jay Salzman 
> <p@dirac.org> wrote:
> >I have a postscript file, dissertation.ps that, out of the blue, started
> >to look ugly when viewed with gs (or gv which uses gs).  The font looks
> >thin and spindly.
> 
> It looks like the one on the right is antialiased, while the one on the 
> left isn't. The one on the left may have substituted a lookalike font, as 
> well. First thing would be to click the "State" button, select "gv 
> options" and "ghostscript" options, and look to see if antialiasing is 
> turned on.
> 
> gs doesn't read fonts through the X server; it loads them from files. "gs 
> -h" will print the list of directories it uses to search for fonts. It 
> may be that debian's gs has some of the X font directories in its search 
> path. If Mark's computer doesn't have X installed then it probably 
> doesn't have the directories in question, so gs ends up using fonts from 
> later directories in the search path.
 
Ken, many thanks to you!

Reading what you had to say about gs getting fonts through files, I
didn't recall ever configuring gs or gv by hand.  I figured maybe they
were different packages (like how there's multiple vim packages).  They
did have different font search paths.

And bingo.  I had gs-afpl 8.14-2 installed and Mark had gs 7.07-1.
Didn't know what the difference was, but I made my packages conform
exactly to his, including removing some of my gs font packages.

My latex files were back to their beautiful self.

I added the extra gsfonts back in (gsfonts-other nd gsfonts-x11), and my
ps files were still good.  Whatever happened, it must have happened
during a recent upgrade of the gs-afpl package.

Thanks Ken, you saved me a lot of heartache!

Pete

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