This page is about how to change the system fonts on your Zaurus. Most of this information is generic to Trolltech's Qtopia environment but some is specific to Sharp's ROM.
Zaurus fonts are stored in /home/QtPalmtop/lib/fonts
in Trolltech's Qt Prerendered Format (QPF).
For rotated screens (such as on the Zaurus SL-C series) you will need to make
two fonts, one for portrait mode and one for landscape. The qpf font for the
rotated screen has "t10
" appended to the filename. If the screen is
rotated and the rotated font is not available, Qtopia will try to use the non-rotated
version of it, usually resulting in garbage. This guide also applies to
single orientation Zaurus, like the SL-5500, SL-6000 and SL-A300.
On most non-Japanese locales Qtopia defaults to helvetica if it can't find the
font it needs. If it can't find it in the normal font directory it will look
for it in /usr/QtPalmtop.rom/lib/fonts
. This can cause confusion
when testing newly installed fonts. Furthermore, calling getFontName() in Qt/embedded
results in the name of the font that was requested rather than the font that was
actually rendered.
This example is using makeqpf-arm and is run on the Zaurus.
./lib
and ./lib/fonts
.bash-2.05$ mkdir /mnt/card/lib bash-2.05$ mkdir /mnt/card/lib/fonts
fontdir
describes the fonts you want to make (see the note below for
restrictions).bash-2.05$ cp myfont.ttf /mnt/card/lib/fonts bash-2.05$ cp fontdir /mnt/card/lib/fonts
bash-2.05$ export QTDIR=/mnt/cardSo you now have something like:
makeqpf-arm -A
from inside the fonts directory:bash-2.05$ cd $QTDIR/lib/fonts bash-2.05$ /path/makeqpf-arm -AThe screen will get covered in junk. The output may have errors but usually the new fonts will be made regardless.
/home/QtPalmtop/lib/fonts
. You will have to
su
in order to get the correct permissions.bash-2.05$ su # cp myfont*.qpf /home/QtPalmtop/lib/fonts
# shutdown -r nowIf makeqpf killed your system, you'll need to do a hard reset (take out the battery for 15 seconds then put it back and turn on again). Therefore I strongly recommend you initiate a reset using the shutdown command as shown above.
makeqpf
in X on your Linux box you will get portrait
fonts by default. Whatever you do, make sure you are running qvfb first or you'll
really be in trouble when Qt/e takes over the framebuffer.The Qtopia system (on the Zaurus at least) are hard coded to use Helvetica for most non-Japanese environments. The menu and general font is the smallest size version of helvetica that is available in the current rotation. If you want to use another font then you will have to replace helvetica.
One of the difficulties is deciding what size fonts to use. Unfortunately, Qt/e changes the preferred font size for the system font and icon font depending on the locale.
# ln -s newfont_100_50.qpf helvetica_100_50.qpfetc.
This is Forgotten Futurist, one of many excellent free fonts from Larabie Fonts:
Find more Zaurus fonts on my Thai Zaurus Fonts page.