I recently ran into a version control problem with git. Well, it wasn’t actually a git problem, but rather a version control management problem. One of the projects that I have been working on has multiple developers working various aspects of a web application. The client recently told me that during a recent merge, git could not handle the number of changes. The reason was that many developers were making changes to the same file(s) (relevant to the scope of their project) and the client waited too long to try to merge.

So I was given the latest file(s) and I had to manually merge my project. I was dumbfounded. I had created JQuery plugins for the project and these were not difficult to insert into the file(s). But I also made a lot of UI changes to the main file and made numerous changes/additions to the CSS file.

After eyeballing each line of code of two files for about 1/2 hour, I realized that there must be a better way. So I googled: ‘File Comparison OS X’ and was surprised to find that I already had a utility installed (FileMerge.app). Apparently, the utility was bundled with XCode. Who Knew?

So I opened the FileMerge app (Macintosh HD/Developer/Applications/FileMerge.app), selected the two files and began to compare the differences. I didn’t want to merge the two files because I did not know how the changes would affect another developer’s code. It took me a while to manually make the changes to the master file(s), but at least I did not have to try to find where the differences were.

I was working on a project where I needed Helvetica fonts on my Ubuntu box. Helvetica fonts are on my mac, but stored in a .dfont file (System/Library/Fonts). First I copied the Helvetica.font to my Ubuntu box (I placed them in my home directory). I then installed Fondu.

sudo apt-get install fondu

Now navigate to where you copied the .dfont file and enter:

fondu Helvetica.dfont

The dfont file will be converted to .ttf files. Depending on the font type, this will create multiple .ttf files.

Copying Fonts to Font Directory

Now you can move the .ttf files into the font directory (/usr/share/fonts/truetype).

This was not as easy as I thought. I opened the file browser and tried to copy/paste the fonts into the fonts directory, but I received a permission denied error because I was not root.

Open terminal (Application->Accessories->Terminal).

gksu nautilus /usr/share/fonts/truetype

Using ‘gksu’ will open the file browser with root privileges. Now open another file browser to the location where you copied your fonts to:

gksu nautilus /home/les/

Now both are opened with root privileges. Now just drag/drop the files into the font directory.

Note: You may have to create a folder with the font name first. If you only have a single font file, then you can just copy it into the Truetype directory (or the appropriate directory – opentype, etc). If you have multiple font files (Helvetica.ttf, HelveticaBold.ttf, etc), then you should first create a folder named helvetica under the TrueType folder and then copy all helvetica files under the helvetica directory.

That’s it.