Arch Linux

Osiris

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Registered: 2003-01-18

Posts: 157

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Font Management: Still a riddle...

Hello,

after all those years I just realized that linux font management still seems to be a riddle for me.

I am a long time KDE user and only used the KDE font config panel so far. Since now, I'm looking into other window mangers (namely i3) at work and KDE at home, I was trying to get some deeper understanding of font settings to manage my two environments in a similar way.

There is ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf. Which is the user-wide font configuration. On my system there are some hinting / anit-aliasing related settings, but no fonts are set.

There is

% fc-match monospace
DejaVuSansMono.ttf: "DejaVu Sans Mono" "Book"

Which is probably set in /etc/fonts/. But it is not the one I set in my KDE font settings, that is Bitstream Vera Sans Mono.

What applications are effected by the KDE settings? KDE/Qt applications of course. GTK? I assume yes, since there is a ~/.gtkrc-2.0 and ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini which looks like there are some settings done by KDE.
However, I set the monospace font to something rediculously large using the KDE font panel. Started Emacs which afaik and according to ldd is a gtk-3 application and saw no change. M-x describe-font returned

name (opened by): -unknown-DejaVu Sans Mono-normal-normal-normal-*-13-*-*-*-m-0-iso10646-1
full name: DejaVu Sans Mono:pixelsize=13:foundry=unknown:weight=normal:slant=normal:width=normal:spacing=100:scalable=true

(I set only the font size, nothing else font related in my .emacs)

So Emacs seems to honor the settings I obtained by fc-match monospace.

What is the best to set fonts globaly (user wide, but indepent from desktop environment)? Setting the desktop environments to use the alias names (Monospace) and set these via ~/.confg/fontconfig/fonts.conf? Is there a GUI for that? Are these aliases (monospace, sans, serif, ...) are the ones application / toolkits / Java usually as default? Why is it not being done by that way by KDE?

Sorry, for the long post, I hope someone could shed some light upon my darkness... ;-)

All the best,
Florian