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Divehi Fonts

An easy way to install Divehi Unicode fonts on linux

How to install

Installing Divehi Unicode fonts for the web on any rpm based linux box with TrueType support is now easy. The instructions below have been tested on RedHat Linux 7.3 and 8.0, but they are fairly generic so they should apply to any redhat-like linux distribution, such as mandrake or yellowdog.

  • 1) Make sure you have the following rpm-packages installed from from your favourite distribution. Any version should do.
    1. a.rpm-build
    2. b.wget
    3. c.A package that provides the ttmkfdir utility.
  • For Example
    • For redhat-7.3 and redhat-8.0, XFree86-font-utils
    • For redhat-7.0, freetype
    • For mandrake-8.2, freetype-tools
  • 2)Download the latest thanaunicode spec file from here.
  • Thanaunicode-1.0.spec
  • 3)Edit the thanaunicode-1.0.spec file with your favourite editor. Everything that needs to be changed is commented clearly in the beginning of the file.
  • 4)Build the binary rpm with this command:
    $ rpmbuild -bb thanaunicode-1.0-1.3-4.spec

    This will download the fonts from the project page and repackage them so that they can be easily installed.

    By default rpm builds packages in a directory that only root has write access to. However, by adding the following line to a file called .rpmmacros in your home directory you can build rpm packages in another location than the system wide default.

    %_topdir YOURHOMEDIR/rpm

  • Replace YOURHOMEDIR with your home directory. If you’re unsure of what is, use the command echo ~ to find out. For this to work you also need to create the directories $HOME/rpm, $HOME/rpm/RPMS/noarch and $HOME/rpm/BUILD5).
  • 5)Install the newly built rpm using the following command (you will need to be root):
    # rpm -ivh $HOME/rpm/RPMS/noarch/thanaunicode-1.0-1.3-4.noarch.rpm
  • 6)You might need to reload the X font server. Normally this is done as a part of the installation process (this is done by chkfontpath). However in some situations it seems like you need to reload or restart the font server manually. I am told that the last argument needs to be restart and not reload on Mandrake 9.0.

    # /sbin/service xfs reload

    A bug in RedHat 8.0 makes the X server lose the connection to the font server if the font server is restarted instead of reloaded. That will cause assorted strange behaviour (changed fonts in newly opened applications, applications hanging). Logging out and logging in again will solve the problems, or just use ‘reload’ instead of ‘restart’.

  • 7)Enjoy your new high quality fonts. Please note that you need to restart all programs that you want to make aware of the new fonts.

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