FOSSwire

Have you ever been in a situation where you desperately need a copy of a font for something you're working on, but you can only seem to find a copy in the wrong format? Often this can happen, and you have the font elsewhere, but it's not in the standard .ttf format you expect.

If you're dealing with a font that has originated on a Macintosh, it might be a font packaged in the .dfont format. This format is Mac-specific and it allows multiple variants of the same font (or even different fonts entirely) to be packaged inside one file and therefore transported more easily, along with Mac-specific metadata... between Macs that is.

Thankfully, there is an open source tool called fondu available for Unix systems that allows you to take one of these dfont files and split it into the individual ttf files it contains. Once you have the .ttf, it is then trivial to add this into your ~/.fonts directory on Linux and use it natively.

On my Ubuntu system, I was able to simply sudo apt-get install fondu, but if a package is not available for your operating system, you can get the source code and compile it yourself.

Once fondu is installed, this is how you use it:

$ fondu name_of_dfont_file.dfont

It will extract the font file into its constituent parts. As well as TTF files, you might notice other files which won't probably be of much use. However, the net result is that you'll get what you want - TTF files that you can now make use of in pretty much any operating system you want.

Most modern graphical user interfaces place menubars underneath the title bar of each window. This approach works well for most people, but there is another concept that is often used.

The most obvious and memorable implementation is in Apple's Mac OS system. What am I talking about? Well, putting one global menu bar at the top of the window; the context of which changes depending on which application is focused.

You might not realise it, but KDE has had this functionality built in to it for quite some time. Enable the right setting, and all KDE applications will share a global menu bar at the top.

It's worth mentioning at this point that it only works for KDE apps, so anything such as Firefox or another application which uses GTK or another toolkit won't have this feature, which will lead to inconsistency.

To enable the feature, right-click anywhere on your KDE desktop and choose Configure Desktop. In the resulting window, click Behaviour on the left, then make sure the General tab is selected.

From there, click Current application's menu bar (Mac OS-style) and click OK. That's it - to reverse the setting, simply choose None in the same dialogue.

Just before I go, I should mention that at the present time there is a project to build in similar support for GNOME/GTK. Its website can be found here, however currently it involves manually patching bits of software and isn't nearly as simple to achieve.