[mythtv-users] OSD fonts

Yeechang Lee ylee at pobox.com
Thu Jan 22 08:43:54 UTC 2009


Josh White <jaw1959 at gmail.com> says:
> I've noticed that most OSD themes I try to use do not match the
> screenshots I see.  The screenshots show very nice looking menus and
> descriptions of what show is on, but when I install them on my
> machine, the fonts are always a basic, not-so-attractive font that
> doesn't match at all.

In addition to the msttcorefonts package already mentioned, make sure
that the Bitstream Vera fonts are installed, too.

Check xorg.conf and make sure the paths for any newly-added font
packages appear in the right place. On my CentOS system, for example,
xorg.conf's FontPath line specifies "unix/:7100", which means that
fonts are actually handled by the xfs font server configured at
/etc/X11/fs/config. Restarting X11 (and, if necessary, xfs beforehand)
is necessary after changes.

MythTV's font usage is somewhat inconsistent. Most themes properly
rely on external fonts. Several OSD themes ship with their own fonts
and are hard-wired to use them. At least two non-OSD themes rely on
the FreeSans font bundled with MythTV for closed captions, but one
must manually tell xorg.conf/the font server the directory where the
font is. For some other non-OSD themes, one must manually copy a font
located in their directories to a specified font directory (a good
place is wherever MythTV's FreeSans font is located, since as noted
you should tell X11 about that directory anyway).

(With all that said, I've never been able to get the HandelGotD font
MePo ships with working; only its OSD properly displays the "Star
Trek"-like font.)

Experiment with substituting your own font choices in place of the
theme designers' own. For non-OSD themes, start with base.xml and
ui.xml; for OSD, osd.xml. Specify the full name of fonts, not the Unix
filenames or the "xxx-yyyyy-xxx-z-xxxxx--11" names xlsfonts provides;
refer to gnome-font-viewer or some other font viewer.

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