xfig problems

This week I needed xfig to edit some figures, however my font path wasn’t set up correctly on gentoo, at least for xfig, and I got the following message (despite of ugly tiny default fonts):

File /home/ritschi/thesis/graphics/mrfilt.fig:
Can’t find --helvetica-medium-r-narrow—13------ISO8859-, using 6x13
Can’t find --helvetica-medium-r-narrow—10------ISO8859-, using 6x13

In order to get the fonts working, I had to add the following line to my xorg config (/etc/X11/xorg.conf ) and to restart X:

FontPath “/usr/share/fonts/default/ghostscript”

Installing xfig on my MacBook from MacPorts yielded first the following warning:

Either you have a very old app-defaults file installed (Fig), or there is none installed at all. You should install the correct version or you may lose some features. This may be done with “make install” in the xfig source directory.

This is because MacPorts mixes the paths and X11 uses /usr/X11/lib/X11/app-defaults, while MacPorts installs the files in /opt/local/lib/X11/app-defaults. Just copy the files to the X11 folder and the warning will go away. Anyway in order to get rid of the first message, the font path for X11 has to be corrected. Till now I haven’t found a way to do this permanently, so I have to do it every time currently:

cd /usr/X11/lib/X11/fonts
ln -sf /opt/local/share/ghostscript/fonts/ ghostscript
fc-cache ghostscript
xset fp+ /usr/X11/lib/X11/fonts/ghostscript
xset fp rehash
xfig