Using Windows fonts

In normal operation when connected to a remote host, phindows receives all text as bitmaps which have already been rendered by the Neutrino font manager. This mode of operation is best in most situations, but at very slow connection speeds you can improve performance by configuring Phindows to use local Windows fonts.

Phindows uses local Windows .ttf (TrueType) and .phf fonts rather than font bitmaps rendered by phrelay, if it finds them in its font directory. This feature is available in phrelay 6.3 or greater and Phindows 2.13 or greater.

To use Windows fonts:

Copy the .phf and .ttf font files to the font/ subdirectory used by Phindows.
To determine the location of the font subdirectory, on the Connect Dialog, click More >>. The font subdirectory is located in the file location that is specified by the Cache Dir: field. Place any fonts in this subdirectory in order to use them in your Phindows session.
Install the copied .ttf fonts in Windows using the Fonts control panel. This procedure depends on the version of Windows you are running. See the Windows online help for more information on installing fonts.

You can check which fonts are being picked up from the Neutrino or Windows side by starting phrelay with the - V and -D command-line options. For example, you can change the /etc/inetd.conf file to start phrelay as follows:

phrelay -x -V -Ddbg_log.txt

Then restart phrelay (for example, with slay -s HUP inetd) to get debug output sent to /dbg_log.txt. With the -V, debug lines for all text rendered using a font present at the Phindows end are recorded. To see which fonts are still being rendered by phrelay and sent as bitmaps, use the -VVV option, which produces more verbose debug information. In the resulting debug output look for the string render opts, which is output every time phrelay calls PfRenderText(). The line before this one gives the font filename, and a few lines after is an ASCII representation of the rendered text bitmap.

Draw buffer size errors

When connecting to a machine running an older version of phrelay, it's possible to exceed the draw buffer limit. You can use the Windows font rendering option to reduce the draw buffer size.