Using KDE 4.8.1 on Fedora 16, I enabled bitmap fonts via font-config. However, I still could not install bitmap fonts (such as ProggyClean) via the KDE Font Manager, which showed a dialog explaining that "[...] is a bitmap font, and these have been disabled on your system." Poking around the sources I found the check for bitmap fonts (FC::bitmapsEnabled) which searches for non-scalable fonts, and when no font is found, it returns "false". Apparently Fedora 16 doesn't include bitmap fonts by default, so this search always returns empty... installing a bitmap font through the package manager solved the issue for me. Is there maybe another way to check whether bitmap fonts are enabled, or to add a "force" option in the dialog to continue installing the bitmap font even when the font manager thinks they are disabled?
Dear Bug Submitter, This bug has been stagnant for a long time. Could you help us out and re-test if the bug is valid in the latest version? I am setting the status to NEEDSINFO pending your response, please change the Status back to REPORTED when you respond. Thank you for helping us make KDE software even better for everyone!
Looking at the source of fontinst in 5.14.3, I believe the issue is still present - if no bitmap fonts are available, fontinst will fail any installation of a bitmap font because it assumes that they have been disabled. However, I can no longer reproduce the issue here since my local installation contains multiple bitmap fonts by default, as is (probably) the common case for most distributions. Changing fontinst could break the error handling when bitmap fonts are actually disabled, so perhaps this issue should be closed.
Thanks for the update!