From: ellis@nova.gmi.edu (Stew Ellis)
Subject: Font problems with OW3 trying to display on Intel 386 with X11R3
Keywords: fonts.alias, bdftosnf, mkfontdir
Organization: GMI Engineering&Management Institute, Flint, MI
Date: Sat, 7 Nov 1992 15:20:04 GMT

I am trying to run cm on a Sun and display it to a 386 running Intel
SYSVR4.0.3, running the Intel version of OL2 based on X11R3.  CM does not
recognize the xview fonts on the 386 because the fonts.dir lists their names
in the old runtogether style.  I have read about aliasing fonts in the OL
and XWIN docs that I got with the Intel UNIX (pre release versions of the
Prentice-Hall books).  I have also read the man pages for mkfontdir, xset,
bdftosnf several times.  Initial attempts reported something about unable to
load font -b&h-lucida-etc.  Because I could not figure out the aliasing
syntax, I simply tried to port the Sun xview fonts from
$OPENWINHOME/share/src/fonts (??), or wherever I found the bdf sources after
someone on the net pointed them out to me.
  After reading the mkfontdir manpage, I had the impression I should be able
to generate a fonts.dir directly from the bdf sources.  When that did not
work on either machine (yes I have root on both), I decided to move the bdf
src from a mounted directory to a local directory on the 386 and compile
them.  I initially just did the 100dpi and 75dpi fonts, which went
smoothly.  I was able to generate fonts.dir and although xset fp rehash did
not rehash my fonts, killing the X server and restarting it and running
xlsfonts showed me that the b&h fonts were now recognized.  The next attempt
to run cm found those fonts, but could not find the olcursor and olglyph
fonts, so I tried to compile them on the 386 as well.  Although the glyph
fonts compiled alright, the olcursor font gave errors and refused to
compile, either on the 386 or the Sun.
  I got the following error message:
   odd number of characters in hex encoding at line 896
I added a line of 00000000 at the end of the font bitmap and recompiled.  I
had to keep doing this several times until I got an SWIDTH error about line
3770, which I could not kludge around.

So I went back to trying to alias my way around it.  I simply have not been
able to figure out how to alias a font name of the sort
 '-sun-open look cursor-----*-*-*-*-*-*-sunolcursor-1' to the existing
olcursor.snf which ends up with the line 
 olcursor.snf	olcursor
in the fonts.dir file when I run mkfontdir. 
Attempts to put a line of the sort
 '-sun-open look cursor---*'	olcursor
in the fonts.alias file cause my server to return an error message if I run
xset fp rehash, and to crash the server if I try to restart it.

What I would like:
  1) An explanation of how to do this kind of font aliasing
-and-
  2) A good copy of the sunolcursor bdf source to compare against the bad
one I have.  (Context diffs would be acceptable)

Thank you very much.

--
--                                                        ___________________
  R.Stewart(Stew) Ellis, Assoc.Prof., (Off)313-762-9765  /   _____  ______ 
  Humanities & Social Science,  GMI Eng.& Mgmt. Inst.   /        / /  /  / /
  Flint, MI 48504      ellis@nova.gmi.edu              /________/ /  /  / /
Newsgroups: comp.windows.open-look