MapGuide tidbits: Strange fonts on Linux

Does your MapGuide Linux installation render labels that look like this?

Instead of this?

This is due to MapGuide not being able to correctly locate the required font in question (Verdana). To fix this, you need to install the appropriate font package that provides the missing font. In the case of verdana, that package is msttcorefonts.

On Ubuntu: Simply install the msttcorefonts package

On CentOS: Install the following packages:

• curl
• xorg-x11-font-utils
• fontconfig

And then install the following RPM packages with the rpm command

• rpm -i http://pkgs.repoforge.org/cabextract/cabextract-1.4-1.el6.rf.i686.rpm
• rpm -i https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/mscorefonts2/rpms/msttcore-fonts-installer-2.6-1.noarch.rpm

Now you can verify your font in question is install by running the fc-list command and looking for the name of your font in the output

fc-list | grep Verdana

Now even after this, MapGuide may still not properly locate this font even if it is installed.

If this is still the case, copy the physical font files to the directory of the mgserver executable (eg. /usr/local/mapguideopensource-2.6.0/server/bin) and restart the MapGuide Server.

In the case of msttcorefonts, the physical font files are found in:

• On Ubuntu: /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts
• On CentOS: /usr/share/fonts/msttcore