FontDatabase - Man Page

This manual page has been written for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution.  It has been adapted from the documentation included in the upstream t1lib distribution.

/etc/t1lib/FontDataBase is a text file which contains, minimally, the basenames of Type 1 font  files to be made accessible to the t1lib font rasterizer library.  The format is intentionally similar to that of the fonts.dir and fonts.scale files used by X11.

Line 1 of this file contains a positive integer specifying the number of fonts declared in that file. This is as in the fonts.dir files of the X11 system.

All remaining lines contain declarations of one font each. The only thing taken from such a line is the last string (delimited by white space) in it. It is assumed to be a filename of the format basename.someextension.

The basename part is assumed to be the basename(1) of a fontfile.  After the a string has been parsed, the extension is cut off and replaced in turn with .pfa and .pfb. The initialization routine tries to open a font file in its search path with one of the resulting filenames.

The remainder of the line, i.e., from beginning to the start of the filename string, is completely ignored and thus may contain information for other programs.

Here is a minimal font database file for 4 fonts:

4
isvl.afm
isvli.afm
isvd.afm
isvdi.afm

This file is minimal, because it contains just the information needed, and nothing not needed by the library.

Here is a more realistic example, which allows an application to match a fully qualified X11 fontname to a FontID in t1lib. This is also a valid font database file:

4
Souvenir Souvenir-Light       --- -itc-souvenir-light-r-normal--#-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1 isvl.afm
Souvenir Souvenir-LightItalic -*- -itc-souvenir-light-i-normal--#-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1 isvli.afm
          Souvenir-Demi       *-- -itc-souvenir-demi-r-normal--#-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1 isvd.afm
          Souvenir-DemiItalic **- -itc-souvenir-demi-i-normal--#-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1 isvdi.afm

/etc/t1lib/FontDataBase

mkfontdir(1x)