Install Proggy Fonts for Emacs in Gentoo

Coding horror discussed various nice programming fonts (see here and here). Intrigued by these posts, I decided to try these fonts on my Gentoo box. Following is a record of what I have done.

Install Fonts in Gentoo

I decided to use Proggy Clean font (website is here). This section is mainly related to this particular font, but I will discuss at the end of this section how to handle other fonts in the same site.

Instead of manually installing the font, I determined to writer one ebuild. Main rationale is to rely on font eclass to automate font installation work. The ebuild could be easily reused and even incorporate into Gentoo portage (hopefully). The other reason is that I want to practice a little bit on portage overlay and to write my first (trivial) ebuild.

Create portage overlay

If you have already setup a overlay, you may skip this part. However it should be noted that all the description in this post assumes that your overlay is located in /usr/local/portage.

Run the following commands.

# mkdir -p /usr/local/portage
# echo 'PORTDIR_OVERLAY="/usr/local/portage"' >> /etc/make.conf    

Create the ebuild

First, create the directories.

mkdir -p /usr/local/portage/media-fonts/ttf-proggy-clean

Next, create a file named ttf-proggy-clean-1.0.ebuild under the directory just created. Fill the contents as below.

inherit font

DESCRIPTION="Proggy Clean TTF font"
HOMEPAGE="http://www.proggyfonts.com/"
SRC_URI="http://www.proggyfonts.com/download/download_bridge.php?get=ProggyClean.ttf.zip"

LICENSE="Proggy"
SLOT="0"
KEYWORDS="alpha amd64 arm ia64 ppc s390 sh sparc x86"
IUSE=""

DEPEND=""

S="${WORKDIR}"
FONT_S=${S}
FONT_SUFFIX="ttf"
DOCS="Licence.txt Readme.txt"

RESTRICT="mirror" 

Some explanations of the ebuild:

• Version: I believe the font is quite stable, therefore version 1.0 should be OK :-).
• License: the license in the package is quite permissive, but since I cannot link it to any existing license, I category it simply as Proggy.

Run the following command to sign the ebuild.

# ebuild /usr/local/portage/media-fonts/ttf-proggy-clean/ttf-proggy-clean-1.0.ebuild digest

BTW, I refers a lot to this when writing this first ebuild (of course, the skeleton is from man font.eclass).

Install font

Now comes our familiar emerge.

# emerge media-fonts/ttf-proggy-clean

Now we need to add the font path. Open file /etc/X11/xorg.conf, find the section Section "Files", and add the following line within the section:

  FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/ttf-proggy-clean"

Then press Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to restart X server. After login again, you may issue the following command (if you have not installed xlsfonts, please do so by typing emerge xlsfonts).

# xlsfonts | grep proggy

You should see several lines looking like -altsys-proggycleantt.... If not, there is something wrong to fix (please check previous typings).

Caveat: before I add the FontPath line in section Files, that section is actually empty! Therefore X simply cannot restart. The solution is to add some default paths into that section, e.g. /usr/share/fonts/100dpi, /usr/share/fonts/misc.

How to use other fonts

Following is a guideline for other fonts listed in the same website.

• Use appropriate directory and file name to represent the font. For example, for Proggy Square X font, one might setup directory /usr/local/portage/media-fonts/proggy-square, and create a ebuild called proggy-square-1.0.ebuild. The directory should be added into /etc/X11/xorg.conf as described above.
• Modify the ebuild:
  • Specify appropriate DESCRIPTION.
  • Use correct SRC_URI.
  • Specify DOCS correctly. I found that X font package does not contain Readme.txt.
  • Specify FONT_SUFFIX. For X fonts, use gz; use ttf (like above) for TTF fonts.

Configure Emacs

Compared with the installation described above, this part is rather easy. Assume that you want to use the font -altsys-proggycleantt-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-m-0-iso8859-1 (you may select one from the output of xlsfonts as described above)d, simply add the following line in your .emacs:

(set-default-font "-altsys-proggycleantt-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-m-0-iso8859-1")