To make fonts available to ghostscript, it suffices to tell ghostscript where the files corresponding to a given font are located. The file that needs to be edited is /usr/share/ghostscript/version/Fontmap. The format is very simple, almost immediately self evident on perusing it.
Adding Type1 fonts is straightforward. Run type1inst on the directory containing the font. type1inst will output a file called Fontmap. Append this file to the ghostscript Fontmap file.
Adding truetype fonts is a little trickier, because we have to get the name of the TrueType font. One way (brute force, alas) to do this is using the ttf2pt1 TrueType to Type1 converter, and grabbing the font name from the afm ( there's got to be a more efficient way ! but this works, ugly as it is ). You do it like this:
ttf2pt1 -A fontname - 2 > /dev/null |grep FontName
Then you add an entry to the ghostscript Fontmap file in the correct format, eg
some-font (/usr/share/fonts/subdirectory/somefont.pbf);
Well, that works fine, but try doing it with 500 or so fonts. This is the kind of thing that calls for a short perlscript:
#!/usr/bin/perl
# ttfontmap -- generate fontmap file for TrueType fonts
my $directory=shift || print STDERR "Usage: ttfontmap {directory}\n";
$directory=~s/\/$//;
for my $fontname ( glob ( "$directory/*.ttf" ) )
{
open ( R, "sh -c \"ttf2pt1 -A $fontname - 2>/dev/null\" |" );
while ( <R> )
{
if ( $_ =~ /^FontName/ )
{
s/^FontName\s*//;
chomp;
print "/" . $_ . " ($fontname);\n" ;
}
}
close R;
}
You can download this script
To set this script up, all you need to do is cut and paste it into a file called ttfontmap, and place the file somewhere in your PATH ( such as /usr/bin ). You run this script like this:
ttfontmap directory > output_file
where directory is the directory containing the fonts. You are left with the file output_file which you can append to your ghostscript fontmap. Note: some will observe that you could just use
ttfontmap directory >> /usr/share/ghostscript/version/Fontmap
However, I advise against this ( what would happen if you typed ``>'' instead of ``>>'' ? )
Once you've made fonts available to ghostscript, you can preview them. Do this by running the ghostscript interpreter on the file prfont.ps in your ghostscript installation, and after you start it, type:
/Fontname DoFont
at the ghostscript font ( where FontName is the ghostscript name of the font you wish to preview ). There are several other ways you can invoke gs. For example, if you want to create a postscript file that you can look at in a nicer postscript viewer such as gv, you can use
gs -sDEVICE=pswrite -sOutputFile=somefile.ps prfont.ps
Having done this, you can also print your output file.