First thing that comes to mind is; when you created the fonts directory and styles.ini manually, did you copy the admin style out of styles.default? The admin style is required to render some of the fonts within the admin section. Also if you look in the font-cache dir, are there any images saved in there? I have fixed the issue with the page appearing to hang when saving styles, so the best advice I can give right now is for you to try updating the plugin to the latest version (0.6.2), then if you still got problems generating images, paste all the relevant info here and I’ll try to help best I can.
I deleted everything related to the plugin and installed the new version (6.3) from scratch – by hand, as my development server isn’t open to the internet for the plugin manager to do the install.
When 6.3 activated, it created the fonts and font-cache directories, but did not create a styles.ini file – but it did delete the styles.default file from the anyfont plugin directory. Maybe something to do with permissions caused that to fail, but the fonts and font-cache directories are owned by the www-data account and group, and have 777 permissions (everybody read and write). Anyway, I extracted that file from the installation file and manually inserted it into the fonts directory and changed the permissions to 777.
I then uploaded a font, created a style, and told it to take over post titles. The code did rewrite the html to make the post title an image pointing to the images/style directory, but no image file was created in the fonts-cache directory and the browser defaulted to displaying the text in the alt tag instead of the font and color image I was hoping for.
Then I decided to go out on a limb and install the plugin on my public facing server so I could let the plugin manager to the install process. And it all worked beautifully!!!
So I’d still like to figure out what’s going weird in the manual install process – I’m suspecting it has to do with permissions – but since the plugin works smoothly on my public facing server I’m a very happy camper right now!!
Thanks!