Hintfile describes several fonts and their hints in a single file. Generally, registration and unregistration of fonts are performed through Hintfile, so creating one is the first step to Defoma-ize a font package.

First of all, enter a package's top directory. If the fonts of the package are located under subdirectory, please enter there, and run the following command.

defoma-hints <category> <font>... 2> hintfile

This command asks various questions for each font listed in <font> which must belong to the specified <category>, and will output Hintfile to hintfile. The hintfile will contain definitions for all the fonts.

If categories of the fonts are partly different, you must run the command and create a hintfile for each category. In other words, category of the fonts described in a single hintfile must be unified.

Note that this command sometimes fails unfortunately because hints-generating routines are not provided for some categories. Currently supported categories are cid, cmap, truetype and type1.

For example, if your font package is placed under ~/font-foo-0.1/, and the type1 fonts foo1.pfa, foo2.pfa and foo3.pfa are located at fonts/ subdirectory, please enter there and run the command like following.

cd ~/font-foo-0.1/fonts defoma-hints type1 foo1.pfa foo2.pfa foo3.pfa > hintfile

After creating Hintfile, you may possibly want to edit one because mechanically created hints are sometimes not enough. This section describes how to modify a hintfile and its syntax.

Hintfile may contain three elements: category declaration, font definitions and comments. Font definitions and comments are permitted to appear in a single hintfile any number of times, while category declaration must not exist more than once.

Category declaration is generally put at the beginning of a hintfile because it must be put before font definitions. Its syntax is: category <category-name>

Font definition describes one font and its hints. It starts with the begin line and ends with the end line. The begin line also specifies which font is to be defined. Lines between these two lines describes hints of the font. Hintfile must not contain more than one font definition of a single font. The syntax of font definition is: begin <font> <HintTypeA> = <hintA1> <HintTypeB> = <hintB1> <hintB2> ... end

Lines starting with `#' are considered as comments.

Following is the generated hintfile of the mentioned example. category type1 begin /path/to/foo1.pfa FontName = Foo-Regular Family = Foo Weight = Medium Shape = Upright NoSerif GeneralFamily = SansSerif Charset = ISO8859-1 Alias = Foo Priority = 30 X-FontName = -adobe-foo-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1 end begin /path/to/foo2.pfa FontName = Foo-Bold Family = Foo Weight = Bold Shape = Upright NoSerif GeneralFamily = SansSerif Charset = ISO8859-1 Alias = FooBold Priority = 30 X-FontName = -adobe-foo-bold-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1 end begin /path/to/foo3.pfa FontName = Foo-Italic Family = Foo Weight = Medium Shape = Italic NoSerif GeneralFamily = SansSerif Charset = ISO8859-1 Alias = FooItalic Priority = 30 X-FontName = -adobe-foo-medium-i-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1 end

The first thing you have to do is to change filenames of fonts to the full paths where these fonts are actually installed. Let's asuume that the font-foo.deb installs these fonts into /usr/share/fonts/type1, then the hintfile goes like this:

category type1 begin /usr/share/fonts/type1/foo1.pfa .. begin /usr/share/fonts/type1/foo2.pfa .. begin /usr/share/fonts/type1/foo3.pfa

After this necessary work done, you may want to change or add some hints. The Syntax of describing hints is: <HintType> = <hint>... where <HintType> decides what type of information is described, and <hint> is a value of the <HintType>. You can specify more than one <hint> for one <HintType> by separating them with space.

Hints include information about the appearance. This information should be correctly set to have better results of substituion by Defoma font substitution mechanism. HintTypes for appearance and their description are listed below.

Weight .. represents the weight of a font. Bold and Light are the most values for this HintType.

Now let's build a Defoma-aware font package. To make things easier, using debhelper is strongly recommended. Following tutorial describes about a debhelper-based package.