Installing old fonts

[slopsbucket]

I’m hoping someone out there can help me with this, I’ve almost finished getting my favourite old Windows games to run in linux. There’s still a couple holding me back. The main one is Nethack.

Yes, I know there’s a linux port but the X11 fonts suck in Nethack and I hate the tiled versions. Can’t play it properly in newer versions of Windows either.

Yes, I’m old fashioned (or just old) and I like to play Nethack how I originally saw it back in 1989 running in DOS using IBM’s Fixed Medium font. This font is distributed with Nethack source code so I’m assuming that it’s free to use under Nethack’s license.

The font is in BDF format and I’ve tried converting it with fontforge but I don’t know how successful I was because I don’t know how to update Wine’s fontcache.

I’m also wondering, if I get this right am I allowed to redistribute my converted version of the font for other people to use? I don’t fully understand the licensing and would like some advice. If it’s a truly “free to use” font could it be made available for other Wine users?

Cheers,

Andrew

[dimesio]

If you've converted the fonts to .ttf, just copy them to the wineprefix's /windows/Fonts directory and Wine should see them.

As for whether you can legally redistribute the modified fonts, ask a lawyer.

[slopsbucket]

Thanks for the reply, programs in Wine can now see that the font is there.

Apparently there's a bit more to font conversion than I first thought though.

I also found a free resource of the old IBM fonts, it might be useful to other Wine users. I won't post a link but if people fire up their favourite search engine with the words "ibm old school fonts" they'll find it pretty quick.

Cheers,

Andrew.