YaBB SE uses a lot of fonts which only come with Windows. A lot of Linux/Unix Users will find that when posting a message, and when viewing messages, the font is really small and really hard to read. This is because the fonts which are installed with Windows (Arial, Verdana, etc.) are not installed with Linux/Unix base install.
What you need:In order to use the proper fonts with Linux, you need a TrueType font server already setup. We are going to presume you have already done this. Instructions to install and setup are available at
LDP Font HOWTO especially the section called
Making Fonts Available to X.
Installing Core Fonts:Once you have your TrueType server installed and ready, you need to download the
Microsoft Core Fonts for the Web Package. These are freely available and redistributable (with certain restrictions on the redistributable part) but can be installed on a Linux system without problems. You can download the files from
http://www.microsoft.com/truetype/fontpack/ . Download the Windows version of each of the fonts available.
You will notice that each file is a .exe file, which Linux can't natively run without WINE or similar. We are not going to use WINE or any other emulator, for that matter. These files are just executable cabinet (.cab) files. You can not repackage these files however and they must stay as Windows executables, so that is why I haven't repackaged them for you to easily download. In order to unpack each file, you will need to download CabExtract from
http://www.kyz.uklinux.net/cabextract.php3 and follow the instructions there to unpack the files.
Make a directory under /usr/share/fonts/ called MSCoreFonts. Move those unpacked files into this directory. Now do the following steps in the console window:
- execute ttmkfdir /usr/share/fonts/MSCoreFonts
- execute chkfontpath --add /usr/share/fonts/MSCoreFonts
- Restart the font server manually by executing /etc/rc.d/init.d/xfs restart or restart the PC.
Now your web browser and other Linux software will use the Microsoft Core Fonts, which will make it easier to view YaBB SE forums and other sites which use those fonts.
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