Activities can't access fonts installed in the home dir

[khaled]

I installed some fonts under ~/.fonts/ and a custom fontconfig file ~/.fonts.conf, but applications can't access any since they are running in their own isolated homes.

[mstone]

Assuming that the files are world-readable (and that the directories are world-traversable), then Activities should be to read them. Since $HOME (and hence "~") are different from /home/olpc, the actitivies will need to explicitly informed of the files' locations.

[bert]

But this would force every activity to manually set the necessary environment variables, or symlink to the font directories. Not only does that introduce a dependency on the "olpc" user name, but also it is impractical to expect every activity to do so.

Instead, the "system" should set things up so that it just works. Since Rainbow is the component that re-routes the activities' home dirs, it seems natural for it to be responsible for ensuring they do not break. Possibly it could leave the responsibility to Sugar.

But a mechanism to generally solve that is needed. It could work by allowing the activity environment vars to be customized, and/or for a set of directories and files linked into each activity's home.

[gregorio]

Milestone Never Assigned deleted

[bert]

Quoting http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Fonts#By_copying_.ttf_files

Note that many guides to fonts for the X Window System suggest you can install fonts in a .fonts directory in the user's home directory.

This could easily be solved by adding /home/olpc/.fonts to the system's font path. Since the XO is a single user system by design, that does seem to be the Right Thing.

[fedejofa]

This could easily be solved by adding /home/olpc/.fonts to the system's font path. Since the XO is a single user system by design, that does seem to be the Right Thing.

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Hi, im student from Uruguay and would like this to be solved. Could that be the definitive solution? It would be nice if children here could add fonts. Especially, it would be nice to add to the machine a capital letter font by default to the machines. In spanish, a MAYUS.ttf. I guess this was another ticket, but i guess is a simple problem that it would be nice if gets solved. Srry for using this comunication way. And thx for the work.

[mstone]

It's fine; thank you for reminding me about it. Thoughts:

a) this will get fixed faster if someone contributes a patch that fixes it. b) regarding Bert's desire to 'generally' solve this -- what do you think of the approach taken in pre-rainbow-0.8.0's rainbow-sugarize assistant script?

[sridhar]

I've tried this in os202, and this looks to be fixed. Fonts placed in /home/olpc/.fonts are available in Write.

[bert]

Well, I'd assume it only works because the security is disabled. Not exactly a "fix" I'd say ;)