I'll be writing a guide on adding fonts to a system, along with proper Xorg configuration. Should be very short and simple. Will cover emerged font packages (which should usually just start working) and manually added fonts. Other suggestions added upon request and review. ( originally requested in Bug 95472 ) Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce:
Created attachment 70259 [details] font-addition.xml rc1 The first draft of my font addition guide.
Created attachment 70264 [details] font-addition.xml rc2 Second draft, minor sentence changes.
Hmm, if I read correctly, most of the guide tells about X's fonts, which are only used by Xlib and Gtk+1 applications, but nothing about fontconfig(?) fonts, which are used by Gtk+2, Qt(?) and so on. If things haven't changed crucially since I last checked, the fonts in Xorg.conf are former, and they are identified in apps by FontSpecs, whereas latter are in fonts.conf and identified only by their actual font familyname and size separated by space. I think this confusion should be cleared up in the documentation. About the document: > Let's look at some of these directories in more detail. <path>/misc/</path> contains many different fonts in various ISO-8859 locales, among other things. <path>/TTF/</path> Perhaps drop the initial slashes here, the paths are not relative to root anyways. > Sometimes it's beneficial to place fonts in a user's home directory, for example <path>/home/youruser/.fonts/</path>. Some graphical desktops, such as fluxbox, don't always use the <path>/usr/share/fonts/</path> paths specified in <path>xorg.conf</path>. In such cases, put fonts in the <path>.fonts/</path> folder of a home directory and then add that path to <path>xorg.conf</path>. Wouldn't that be because default fonts.conf contains ~/.fonts but xorg.conf doesn't? > you can restart your X session, or press Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to kill it. Start it again by typing <c>startx</c>. > # <i>/etc/init.d/xdm restart</i> Why two different methods for same thing in one doc? Oh yeah, don't mix directories and folders. Former reside on filesystem and latter in graphical file managers.
Created attachment 70455 [details] font-addition.xml rc3 I implemented Flammie's suggestions with the exception of the first one. I'm not sure that I need to reference /etc/fonts/fonts.conf, as it will only confuse users. It's not really something that's important to setting up fonts, anyway, as you're not supposed to edit fonts.conf. What's really important is that things like ~/.fonts need to be added to xorg.conf, since that's the config file that needs to know about additional font locations. Yes, fonts.conf already has that path in it, but unless some good clarification is provided on why I should include that specific reference, discussing fonts.conf is really irrelevant to the process of setting up working font paths, AFAICT.
(In reply to comment #4) > [...] I'm > not sure that I need to reference /etc/fonts/fonts.conf, as it will only > confuse users. It's not really something that's important to setting up fonts, > anyway, as you're not supposed to edit fonts.conf. You are supposed to edit /etc/fonts/local.conf instead. Fonts.conf is the primary font configuration stuff, so it is important. > What's really important is that things like ~/.fonts need to be added to > xorg.conf, since that's the config file that needs to know about additional > font locations. Yes, fonts.conf already has that path in it, but unless some > good clarification is provided on why I should include that specific reference, > discussing fonts.conf is really irrelevant to the process of setting up working > font paths, AFAICT. I'm confused about status of fonts.conf in system, and I bet I'm not the only one. If I read Gentoo font guide, I'd expect to find clarification for my confusion. The current guide mostly only shows how to emerge packages and where to copy fonts, but these are not the problems users are facing with fonts, so while those instructions are a good reference, I think that this guide as it is will fail to address the problems I would like it to solve (fonts.conf vs Xorg vs font servers and such stuff has traditionally been quite common problem in forums and mailing lists.) Perhaps we should Cc fonts herd here to provide some further information?
(In reply to comment #5) >(fonts.conf vs Xorg > vs font servers and such stuff has traditionally been quite common problem in > forums and mailing lists.) > > Perhaps we should Cc fonts herd here to provide some further information? That's probably a good idea. I'm doing a little bit of work on local.conf and ~/.fonts.conf, as well as what's needed to have all this work with xfs, but only to pass the time. I think I need a little more clarification as to what you mean, from you and the fonts herd. At this point in the guide, a user should not be confused: it's not like I say "here we have this file fonts.conf. ignore it. moving on..."--that would leave users wondering what it's for. Besides, I wasn't intending to write a "how to set up antialiasing and hinting and rgb order" guide; those are quite huge topics in and of themselves. Now, I might be willing to touch on those topics briefly, as that's what most of the settings in local.conf are for. But a word from the font guys would be nice.
*** Bug 95472 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 6690 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 27013 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 111554 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Created attachment 75352 [details] font-addition.xml This is not complete yet, but I've started adding the new content that dsd and I have talked about. I wanted to show that I haven't forgotten about the document, and will hopefully have a finished version very soon. :)
A few notes "<path>TTF</path> contains TrueType fonts, which end in a .ttf extension. TrueType fonts are used extensively in operating systems such as Windows." Nice to refer to the baseline, but we're on linux here. You can just say that any modern OS uses mainly TTF. "<path>Type1</path> contains Type 1 fonts, although Type 1 fonts generally aren't as pretty as TrueType fonts, as the latter allows for better hinting." This is in theory true, in practice 99% of the free TTFs are badly hinted and as such no better or even worse than Type 1's . Look at eg. the Luxi TTFs that come with X, the Type 1's that are also provided render better glyphs, especially at small sizes. "<path>75dpi</path> and <path>100dpi</path> contain standard fonts in 75 dots per inch and 100 dots per inch, respectively." Nice, but what does that mean to the random geezer who reads this ? What is the added value ? If there's anything worth mentioning about this, is the fact that they're bitmaps and serve 'old' applications (altough that group of apps is quickly diminishing). "you can restart your X session by typing <c>/etc/init.d/xdm restart</c>." afaik this is just a quick kill of the session ? I'm not sure thats what you want a user to do without being aware of the consequences. Also this needs to be done as root, so a bit more info is needed. "If you have a TrueType font (.ttf), you can move it to <path>/usr/share/fonts/TTF</path>. Otherwise, you can drop it into <path>/usr/share/fonts/misc</path>." No, this will mess with the Gentoo's font handling. Non-ebuilded fonts should go in /usr/local/share/fonts (subdirred would be smart). Anyway, I would split this in a 'sysadmin' and 'user' section, as user it is just so much easier to drop fonts in your ~/.fonts dir and thats the only thing most people will need. "Once you've added fonts to a home directory, you may need to restart the X server and rebuild its font cache in order to use them:" Well you don't really need to rebuild the cache, fontconfig will pick up the fonts anyway. Building the cache may have some plusses for syswide font installs in /usr/local , but should be restricted to the dir with the new fonts only, so 'fc-cache -v <dir>'. The -f switch for fc-cache should probably not be promoted as it can have negative consquences. In general I would not focus so much on Xfont configuration like the document does now, 99% of the users is on recent QT/Xfce/GNOME/GTK and it is completely irrelevant to them. The focus should be on fontconfig configuration, X fonts has so little impact I doubt it needs mentioning at all. Also with xorg 7 it seems there is a basic set of ttf and bitmap fonts installed by default, so the USE flags bit is almost obsolete and I wouldn't really suggest installing any more bitmaps fonts than a default set for legacy app support. One last thing is that Xfont support requires mkfontscale and mkfontdir to be run for fonts to be picked up, this is not touched at all in the doc.
(In reply to comment #12) > "If you have a TrueType font (.ttf), you can move it to > <path>/usr/share/fonts/TTF</path>. Otherwise, you can drop it into > <path>/usr/share/fonts/misc</path>." > > No, this will mess with the Gentoo's font handling. Non-ebuilded fonts should > go in /usr/local/share/fonts (subdirred would be smart). Anyway, I would split > this in a 'sysadmin' and 'user' section, as user it is just so much easier to > drop fonts in your ~/.fonts dir and thats the only thing most people will need. /usr/share/fonts/local/ is the provided directory for sysadmin-supplied fonts. > One last thing is that Xfont support requires mkfontscale and mkfontdir to be > run for fonts to be picked up, this is not touched at all in the doc. Worth mentioning also that all fonts ebuilds take care of this, it's only needed to run manually when adding non-Gentoo-packaged fonts.
(In reply to comment #13) > /usr/share/fonts/local/ is the provided directory for sysadmin-supplied fonts. It doesn't matter much, but FHS wise /usr/local is the place for local modifications. I prefer it for cleanliness sake, makes it so that /usr/* except for /usr/local is ebuild territory only.
(In reply to comment #14) > (In reply to comment #13) > > /usr/share/fonts/local/ is the provided directory for sysadmin-supplied fonts. > > It doesn't matter much, but FHS wise /usr/local is the place for local > modifications. I prefer it for cleanliness sake, makes it so that /usr/* except > for /usr/local is ebuild territory only. Yes, that's true. It's just the historical location, so people may have stuff in there.
(In reply to the above) Thanks for the tips, guys. I'll have a different version up...at some point. My original intent with this draft was to show how to manage fonts *without* a DE's built-in graphical interface. It's pretty much a no-brainer to open up the Fonts dialogue in Gnome/KDE/Xfce and change settings. It's not nearly as intuitive if you use something even more lightweight like *box, or if the major DE helper apps don't have enough options for ya. Still, maybe altering the focus of the guide is a good thing...I don't plan on writing an Xorg 7.0 section, though, as this guide deals only with stable systems. dsd and I talked about this awhile back, and Donnie alluded to the fact that users have more font troubles than just installing & using; perhaps a manual DPI/antialiasing/hinting section should be added. Anyone who wants to help with this or an Xorg 7 writeup should feel free to jump right in. :)
Maybe later.
