PhonoRipper - FAQ

Question : I tried to run phonoripper, but I get a segmentation fault before the window shows up.

Answer : This is most likely a TkImg issue. Unfortunately some distributions seem to ship a broken TkImg install. If you wish, you can verify this from within a console:

[you@linux ~]$ wish
% package require Img
1.3
% image create photo testimage -file /usr/local/share/phonoripper-0.10.1/icons/dialog_question.png
testimage
%

If this segfaults, it is for sure that TkImg is broken, I am afraid only recompiling the sources can help here.

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Q : Each time I start PhonoRipper it yells at me, something about multithreading and "Use at your own risk".

A : Some linux distributions (especially some flavors of debian) used to ship with a broken Tcl / Tk installation. Something on these systems seems to break the multithreading support in Tk. So if your Tcl / Tk is built with multithreading support, it might be broken but it not necessarily is (in fact most seem to be not). If you get this message I strongly recommend running Phonoripper from a console, so in case the window freezes, you can at least kill the application easily.

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Q : Trying to start phonoripper, I get an error message "Unable to find Python Imaging Library, aborting".

A : Probably the Python Imaging Library (PIL) is not installed properly; some distributions split PIL into several packages, so it is also possible that you installed PIL but still the Tk bindings for PIL are missing. For example on Debian and Ubuntu you need to install both the python-imaging and python-imaging-tk packages.

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Q : When I print a CD booklet, some fonts are not printed correctly, but I get something that looks like Helvetica or Courier or so, what's that?

A : Postscript fonts appear to be a quite delicate matter. When creating the postscript for printing, Tk tries to guess the correct postscript font name for the fonts in use and in most cases it does a good job. Sometimes it happens though, that the font name Tk generates for the postscript is not recognized by the postscript interpreter which then falls back to something simple, usually Times, Helvetica or Courier. What makes it even worse is that it looks like not all postscript interpreters seem to behave the same, and it is quite hard to find any reliable documentation on which font names postscript expects.
So what you can try is either to save the postscript to a file instead of sending it directly to the printer and then change the font name with any text editor and see what happens. For example, I could get the "comic sans ms" font to be printed properly by changing its name in the postscript file from "ComicSansMs" into "ComicSansMS". Or you can simply pick a different font :(

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