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Hello all. I've been having trouble installing a handful of fonts as per the wiki's instructions. I'll admit I have not yet tried creating a package with pacman, but I do want to understand why this is failing for me when it ostensibly shouldn't be.
Whenever I use the
xset fp+ <dir>
command, it fails every time, even after using mkfontdir and mkfontscale in the directories i'm trying to set.
here's the error message i'm getting.
in /usr/share/fonts/misc/<my font>
% sudo mkfontscale
% sudo mkfontdir
% xset fp+ .
xset: bad font path element (#95), possible causes are:
Directory does not exist or has wrong permissions
Directory missing fonts.dir
Incorrect font server address or syntax
i've tried this multiple times in multiple locations, and with sudo, and the error message is always the same (though the number sometimes changes). Frankly I'm not really sure how to tackle this problem. The directory does exist, there is a generated fonts.dir, but i'm not sure exactly what it means by "font server address". I've googled the error, but I've only found other people facing the same issue (on multiple different distributions of Linux), and any solution given to them has not worked for me.
I can install fonts fine with fontconfig, and the fonts I have installed to /usr/share/fonts/misc do show up in fc-list. However, not all the applications I use rely on fontconfig, and so can't use the fonts it detects exclusively. I can give any other information needed about my system. Thanks
Last edited by ivysly (2020-08-05 17:02:03)
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% xset fp+ . /usr/share/fonts/misc/iv
^
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is . not a synonym for "current directory"? in any case, i have used this command directly specifying the folder as well, to the same effect.
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Yes, but
a) nowhere above was suggested that $PWD is a legit font path (and the errors suggest it is not)
b) xset fp+ takes a comma separated list if you want to append multiple paths
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Is `xset fp+ <dir1> <dir2>` even expected to work? In all the documentation it is only `xset +fp <dir>` in a for loop through the directories. So note two differences: whether xset can accept multiple path parameters (without the above-mentioned comma separated list) and whether "fp+" works the same as "+fp".
EDIT: oops, sorry, nevermind the point on fp+ vs +fp, I'm not sure how I missed that.
Last edited by Trilby (2020-08-05 17:09:30)
"UNIX is simple and coherent..." - Dennis Ritchie, "GNU's Not UNIX" - Richard Stallman
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sorry, i didnt think to mention - that is just my zsh theme. that second path shown in my paste is just the current directory. i'll edit for clarity.
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The position of the "+" controls the insertion of the font path. fp+ appends is (check the xset help)
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I just did some testing here, and "." is not accepted and gives the same error as in OP, but $PWD is accepted. This should be no suprise (in hindsight) as "." is not expanded by the shell in prior to passing the argument (while $PWD is).
Last edited by Trilby (2020-08-05 17:13:54)
"UNIX is simple and coherent..." - Dennis Ritchie, "GNU's Not UNIX" - Richard Stallman
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The '.' is wrong, needs to be an absolute path. Actually using $PWD works.
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Thanks, but, and I suppose I wasn't clear here, the problem persists when i actually write the full path, too.
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% xset fp+ . xset: bad font path element (#95), possible causes are: Directory does not exist or has wrong permissions Directory missing fonts.dir Incorrect font server address or syntax
Have you investigated/eliminated all these possible causes?
(TBH, I have no answer what the last one means but I'm sure you will find out)
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Yeah, I have experimented with both of the first two possible causes, but like you I dont understand the third line.
...In any case, after troubleshooting and rebooting a few times... it's working. I don't really know what changed, but that solves that, I suppose.
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