From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; de-DE; rv:1.4.1) Gecko/20031114 Description of problem: rpm -qi urw-fonts: ... The fonts.dir file font names match the original Adobe names of the fonts (e.g., Times, Helvetica, etc.). ... X11-Core-Fontsystem using xfs: fonts.dir not contains "helvetica" e.g. fonts.dir is build with "mkfontdir", fonts.scale with "mkfontscale" using the fontfiles (s050000l.afm ...). Fontfiles not contents this names. Formerly fonts.dir and fonts.scale became distributed by rpm. Xft: fc-cache produced fonts.cache-1 without "helvetica" ... Note: Fontnames "Times", "Helvetica" and so on are very important for users! Many programs this awaiting! We have installed Fedora (formerly RedHat) on very many computers. Users exasperate in relations to modifications in this regard (not only urw-fonts). The are not informatics and attach importance to stable work. To defend against W... is very hard ... Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): urw-fonts-2.1-5.1 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. OpenOffice and old documents (Helvetica 2. mathematica (not OpenSource) 3. ... Additional info:
This can't actually be fixed, sorry. They aren't "real" versions of Times and Helvetica, and can't be named as such. For example, Helvetica is a trademark of Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG and exclusively licensed through Linotype GmbH. Nimbus Sans strongly resembles it, and it based on it, but cannot share the same name. Xft's aliasing means that it works pretty closely, though. Xft will match requests for Times and Helvetica with the near matches, "Nimbus Roman No9 L" and "Nimbus Sans."
Comment #1 states "Xft will match requests for Times and Helvetica with the near matches, "Nimbus Roman No9 L" and "Nimbus Sans." but this doesn't seem to be true. The command > xload -fn '-*-helvetica-bold-r-normal--21-*-*-*-*-*-ISO8859-*' yields the message: Warning: Cannot convert string "-*-helvetica-bold-r-normal--21-*-*-*-*-*-ISO8859-*" to type FontStruct This behavior is observed under Fedora 7 with urw-fonts-2.3-6.1.1.
(In reply to comment #2) > The command > > xload -fn '-*-helvetica-bold-r-normal--21-*-*-*-*-*-ISO8859-*' > yields the message: > Warning: Cannot convert string > "-*-helvetica-bold-r-normal--21-*-*-*-*-*-ISO8859-*" to type FontStruct That is not using Xft, but X core fonts. You can use xlsfonts to list the core fonts available.
*** Bug 245961 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***