Font path specifications are, by default, located in /etc/fonts/fonts.conf file, and this file should not be changed as it is overwritten by package upgrades. File /etc/fonts/local.conf should have all the local modifications and additions to the /etc/fonts/fonts.conf file which is system-wide, and $HOME/.fonts should have modifications and additions which is specific for certain user. However, regarding font paths, once specified in either of *.conf files, they cannot be excluded - that is, all <dir>...</dir> directives are added togehter to form search path in all files. For example, my problem was that Helvetica font could not be rendered anti-aliased, and lot of web sites use this font in their CSS (such as http://www.theregister.co.uk/). The only solution was to remove the directory where these fonts have been installed from the search path of the fontconfig. However, this specific path was in fonts.conf file, which should never be changed. Therefore, my suggestion is that these font paths should be moved to local.conf where they can be manipulated easily and without fear of overwritting it with next fontconfig upgrade build. The change is trivial, as it consists of a patch file already present in the fontconfig ebuild that should point to local.conf instead of font.conf. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. change fonts.conf to include all /usr/share/fonts/* directories except for /usr/share/fonts/Type1 dir. 2. fc-cache -fv 3. emerge fontconfig 4. fc-cache -fv searches thru /usr/share/fonts/Type1 again Actual Results: Helvetica font is back in its ugly form. Expected Results: Move <dir></dir> directives to /etc/fonts/local.conf where they can be preserved.
I agree totally. The <dir> tags should be in local.conf because it depends on each user and they can be preserved.
I have wrotten to fontconfig mailing list to questioning about this problem http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/fontconfig/2005-November/001730.html http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/fontconfig/2005-November/001737.html They certainly can't put all fonts in local.conf
in fontconfig-2.4 which is stable on all arches you can now specify directories to exclude in local.conf. eg. <rejectfont> <glob>/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts</glob> </rejectfont>
