Font fun in Gimp on Mac

While whipping up a theme for the nascent Planet Wikimedia, I needed to use the standard font for Wikimedia logos, Gill Sans.

Gill Sans seems to come conveniently preinstalled on Macs, so I opened up my MacBook, symlinked the Mac fonts from /Library/Fonts to /usr/lib/x11/fonts/TTF, and whipped out Gimp… Unfortunately I ran into an old problem I’d forgotten about:

Fonts o doom.png

For some fonts, only the bold-italic version seems to come up in the font list. This time I decided to get to the bottom of it. Poking at the font files, I found that Gill Sans comes as a single .dfont file instead of the more traditional bundle of .ttfs. While Gimp/Freetype was happy to read the file, it appears to only pick up one of the style variants — in this case bold italic.

Some googling turned up this page which included a hint that you can extract .ttf files out of a .dfont using the utility fondu. Conveniently this is available as a fink package, so in a couple minutes I was able to replace the .dfont symlinks in /usr/lib/x11/fonts/TTF with separated .ttf files. Restart Gimp, and presto!

Fonts o fun.png

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