Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 195527
scalable PostScript fonts from ghostscript-fonts package cannot be added to font path
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:11:35 EST
The basic problem here is: how do I make scalable Type-1 Postscript (Times, Courier etc) available system-wide (i.e include them in the font path)? I think these fonts are supplied by ghostscript-fonts-5.50-13.1 (residing in /usr/share/fonts/default/ghostscript) but they can't be added to the font path because there is no fonts.dir file: If I type chkfontpath -a /usr/share/fonts/default/ghostscript I get the error message: chkfontpath: error opening /usr/share/fonts/default/ghostscript/fonts.dir, unwilling to add path This is mysterious because if you go to sourceforge or rpmfind then you can download ghostscript-fonts-8.11-1ht which offers the scalable PostScript fonts, including a fonts.dir file so that they can be added to the font path and used by everyone. Why doesn't Fedora Core include ghostscript-fonts-8.11-1ht then? PS: By the way, the package urw-fonts-2.3-6.1 offers a bunch of scalable fonts (residing in /usr/share/fonts/default/Type1) which CAN be added to the font path, but these do not include the standard PostScript "Times", "Courier", etc.
Yeah - right! Next thing, you'll be asking for ghostscript 8.54. which is under GPL now! It is a shame that Fedora's ghostscript historically is just OLD! It is too much work to keep it up to date, I guess.
Actually we track ESP GhostScript -- as we have been asked to many times. We are at the very latest version of that.
OK, that addresses Comment #1. But the bug that I am reporting is to do with the way the ghostscript fonts are packaged, not to do with which version of ghostscript is being used. Basically I am saying: Please can you make ghostscript-fonts-5.50-13.1 be more like urw-fonts-2.3-6.1 and include a fonts.dir file.