You need to delete the file and not just rename it, and there might be another file that you need to symlink into that directory (see my last contribution) to actually make it work.

Also, some background:

X has two font systems. There's the old one, which is queried by xfontsel and xlsfonts, and the new one, called FontConfig, which is configured using files in /etc/fonts/conf.d and which Gumeric (now) actually uses. A query using xfontsel or xlsfonts will tell you whether the font is installed at all. It is, so good; we just need to make in available to Fontconfig.

apt package fontconfig is installed and is the latest version: 2.13.1-2ubuntu3
But, how do I run this program? FontConfig and fontconfig give command not found, and doing locate on both forms do not show such an executable.
Thanks,
Jon

No, I did everything in that message, no error message, but it is still the same.
YES, I can tell gnumeric to use courier new, but I have to do this for every file and region of cells that don't show up properly. So, I deleted 70-no-bitmaps.conf and created the link for 70-yes-bitmaps.conf
Thanks for the help.
Jon

Well, I unpacked the files in xfonts-100dpi_1.0.3.tar.gz, went down to font-adobe-100dpi and did ./configure make and sudo make install, it built a bunch of files like courR12-ISO8859-##.bdf, where ## is a number between 1 and 15. Still doesn't show up properly in font-manager. (it shows as blocks with numbers in them.)
fc-list | grep courR shows a bunch of fonts like:
/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi/courR12-ISO8859-1.pcf.gz: Courier:style=Regular
/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi/courR12.pcf.gz: Courier:style=Regular
/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi/courR12.pcf.gz: Courier:style=Regular
/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi/courR12-ISO8859-1.pcf.gz: Courier:style=Regular
So, it knows something is there... In fact, it looks like they were all there ALL ALONG, as the same fonts
are there for the 75dpi, but they have older dates.

Are these .pcf.gz fonts the right form for X to use?

backtracking a bit....DavidMcCann has already mentioned he has searched and downloaded a font called Courier New.

Is that the real name you are looking for?

If so, there is another way of getting it use your package manager to install
ttf-mscorefonts-installer

debian package tells you what it does
https://packages.debian.org/bullseye...onts-installer

after it installs run this command
My result is
Courier New: Courier_New.ttf: "Courier New" "Regular"

ref
https://jichu4n.com/posts/how-to-set...ases-on-linux/

It is probably safer to then do a full reboot before opening gnumeric and trying again YMMV

No, I have existing (old) spreadsheets that call for "courier' NOT "Courier New".
I can easily select a bunch of cells and change font to "Courier New", but that is tedious and error-prone
for hundreds of spreadsheets. It would be simplest to just make "Courier" available. Courier New does exist
on the system.

Thanks,
Jon

Here's what I get for Courier (I get the same result as you for "courier New":

for family in "Courier"; do echo -n "$family: "; fc-match "$family"; done
Courier: pcrr8a.pfb: "Courier" "Regular"

This was covered in posts #1, #6 and #18. :/


Depending on the specifics of the file format, this might be as simple as loop + Sed (although it could also be a lot more involved).

Can you backup and edit a single file then compare the before and after to see what has changed?


I'm not sure how to determine this, but are you sure Gnumeric is looking for a TTF file? (I have a Courier font that is a FON file, which is bitmap not vector; may or not be the same as the PCF one you tried.)

Presumably there's some place in the Gnumeric source code and/or saved file that will identify what format(s) it accepts.

I have no idea what font format gnumeric uses, although for screen presentation, bitmaps seem to make the most sense. But, ALSO the font-manager utility in Ubuntu shows the same blocks with hex numbers for "Courier".
Thanks,
Jon

WOW, this actually looks like it will work! I had to do a bunch of stuff to force gunzip to unzip the .gnumeric file into pure ASCII XML, then the editing was easy with emacs, then recompress, rename and it seems to work. I just changed all occurrences of "Courier" to "Courier New" and the spreadsheets look fine.

Not sure how difficult it would be to create a script to do this.

Thanks,
Jon

Doesn't sound like it'd be too bad, especially if it extracts a single file. (For decompression you may want "unzip" rather than "gunzip", specifically "unzip -p" may avoid needing to creating a temporary file.)

For editing, there are dedicated tools for dealing with XML via command line/scripts - I think XMLStarlet is the favoured one.

Well, the problem has been beaten into submission, but not actually solved.
I wrote a script to :
copy the .gnumeric file to .gz
gunzip the file to ASCII XML
sed all ocurrences of "Courier" to "Courier New"
gzip the file
rename to .gnumeric
and voila, the fields that were unreadable are now visible.
Some older files I had that were created by the NExS spreadsheet program had some formulas that did not convert properly, so those had to be dealt with manually.
So, at least partly, I was able to automate the process.
Thanks for all the suggestions, guys!
Jon

I guess you could also use the ssconvert tool that comes with Gnumeric.

At the very least, you can directly unpack .gnumeric files with it.

And converting to a spreadsheet format that doesn't support fonts (e.g. OLEO, or SC) and then back to .gnumeric might just force Gnumeric to use default font.