Suggestion for Beginners' Guide, on Fonts

bjackman · 2012-01-31 23:47:00

I don't really understand the landscape of how fonts work in an OS, but from my exploration of my filesystem and Firefox's settings it seems there are very few fonts available in the default installation. This wouldn't usually bother me, but after seeing that Firefox seemed to be displaying only two fonts I decided I needed at least a proper sans-serifs font.

I found that all I had to do was type "pacman -S ttf-liberation" and the package manager seemed to add all the font maps to /usr/share/fonts/TTF and also add that directory to X's font path, and straightaway I had 4 working fonts: A sans-serifs, a serifs, a monospace and a narrow sans-serifs, all Free, which Red Hat publish. Then I just went to the FF preferences dialogue and set these as the default fonts for their respective categories (so that a CSS style like "font-family: sans-serifs" produces the LiberationSans font).

It occurred to me that this could easily have been one of the items on my mental tick-list of quick & easy post-installation tasks (like "add a user, setup sudo, install X, install WM, setup ALSA, install flashplugin"). I thought maybe this should be added to the Wiki in a place where other newbies would see it.

Seeing as the Beginner's Guide, Installation Guide and General Recommendations pages are probably by far the most significant entrance point for prospective Arch users, I decided that editing it was not something one should take too lightly, especially being a newbie, So I thought I'd just go halfway and suggest it here.

Another reason I didn't add it is I don't know which (if any) article this tip would fit. Also you might say that providing a quick and ugly fix like that goes against the Arch Way.

Anyway, I don't know. Whether or not it's a terrible idea for the Wiki, it's a good tip for next time you install Arch and want to quickly move away from the default fonts for web-browsing.

jasonwryan · 2012-02-01 00:04:02

Fonts are a personal choice. The Beginners' Guide is just to get you up and running with the basics - adding the dressing (like fonts, window managers etc) is covered in the wiki proper.

My sense is that the Beginners' Guide is already sufficiently detailed (perhaps too much so) and that adding more to it would just be bloat

karol · 2012-02-01 00:10:12

Things like that should go either to the fonts article or e.g. to the the firefox article.
As you can see, https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ge … ions#Fonts has just links to the proper articles.

Roken · 2012-02-01 00:33:13

I can understand the request - fonts and font rendering are perhaps amongst the top questions on a variety of forums, but as has been said, much of it is down to personal choice. If you have a problem with fonts in general that isn't already answered in the wiki then by all means ask, but for sourcing fonts that are "nice", you are pretty much on your own. One man's poison is another man's cream.

Arch Linux

#1 2012-01-31 23:47:00

Suggestion for Beginners' Guide, on Fonts

#2 2012-02-01 00:04:02

Re: Suggestion for Beginners' Guide, on Fonts

#3 2012-02-01 00:10:12

Re: Suggestion for Beginners' Guide, on Fonts

#4 2012-02-01 00:33:13

Re: Suggestion for Beginners' Guide, on Fonts

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