From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.1 (X11; Linux i686; U;) Gecko/20020417 Description of problem: When Abiword first runs, it looks for certain font files (I believe they are font metrics files), such as times.afm. If the file does not exist, Abiword attempts to run a script that will generate these files from the existing TrueType file. In the current version of your package (abiword-0.99.5-1) this won't work for two reasons. First, the script Abiword calls to build times.afm looks for a program in the path /usr/share/AbiSuite/bin, when the actual installed path is /usr/lib/AbiSuite/bin. This was easily resolved by adding a softlink in /usr/share/AbiSuite. Second, since only root has write access to Abiword's font directory, execution will fail unless Abiword is run as root (of course this only needs to be done once). This is only an issue if a user is replacing the default fonts with something else that includes its own Times font. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Move the original font directory out of the way 2. Make a new font directory 3. Copy (or soft-link) Windows TrueType fonts into this font directory. The "Times" font needs to be part of the set. 4. Restart XFS (to build fonts.scale and fonts.dir) 5. Run abiword Actual Results: Abiword reports that times.afm is missing, and it can't get the font metrics info from the X server. Then it shuts itself down. Expected Results: Abiword should run. :-) More specifically, Abiword is supposed to be able to build times.afm itself. Additional info:
This should be fixed once abiword moves to using Xft for their font backend, but this isn't planned for the 1.0.x releases. Until then, adding fonts has to be done manually by the system administrator.