Solving Fonts Issues with Installing RMagick on Ubuntu

This entry was published on Sunday, October 7, 2007

Are you getting errors about missing fonts when compiling RMagick on Ubuntu?

<--- ext/RMagick
... Output intentionally deleted ...
<--- ext/RMagick
<--- ext
setup.rb: entering post-setup phase...
post-setup.rb: setting up documentation...
/usr/bin/ruby1.8 -I /home/thebitguru/RoR/RMagick-2.0.0/./lib -I /home/thebitguru/RoR/RMagick-2.0.0/./ext/RMagick InitialCoords.rb
/home/thebitguru/RoR/RMagick-2.0.0/./lib/rvg/misc.rb:321:in `get_type_metrics': unable to read font `/usr/share/ghostscript/fonts/n019003l.pfb' (Magick::ImageMagickError)
        from /home/thebitguru/RoR/RMagick-2.0.0/./lib/rvg/misc.rb:321:in `render'
        from /home/thebitguru/RoR/RMagick-2.0.0/./lib/rvg/misc.rb:696:in `text'
        from /home/thebitguru/RoR/RMagick-2.0.0/./lib/rvg/text.rb:65:in `add_primitives'
        from /home/thebitguru/RoR/RMagick-2.0.0/./lib/rvg/container.rb:72:in `add_primitives'
        from /home/thebitguru/RoR/RMagick-2.0.0/./lib/rvg/container.rb:72:in `each'
        from /home/thebitguru/RoR/RMagick-2.0.0/./lib/rvg/container.rb:72:in `add_primitives'
        from /home/thebitguru/RoR/RMagick-2.0.0/./lib/rvg/rvg.rb:264:in `add_outermost_primitives'
        from /home/thebitguru/RoR/RMagick-2.0.0/./lib/rvg/rvg.rb:264:in `each'
        from /home/thebitguru/RoR/RMagick-2.0.0/./lib/rvg/rvg.rb:264:in `add_outermost_primitives'
        from /home/thebitguru/RoR/RMagick-2.0.0/./lib/rvg/rvg.rb:236:in `draw'
        from InitialCoords.rb:22

The fonts are available but they are in a different location. You can validate this by running locate n019003l. This command should print out the location of the fonts. On my kubuntu system I created a symbolic link to the correct location and then it worked fine.

root@vision:~# ln -s /usr/share/fonts/type1/gsfonts/ /usr/share/ghostscript/fonts/
Back to blog...