Arch Linux

Bmdntg

Member

Registered: 2016-10-11

Posts: 34

Understanding font configuration is a nightmare

Hello,

I'm trying to change my terminal font and system font but I don't understand anything about font configuration, what is serif or sans and when it is used and the arch wiki looks like a mess.

How do fonts work on GNU/Linux ?

I'm on i3-wm with xterm.

Thank you.

loqs

Member

Registered: 2014-03-06

Posts: 19,113

Re: Understanding font configuration is a nightmare

Serif.  How did you try and change the terminal font?  What do you mean by system font?  Which article(s) on the arch wiki in particular do you consider a mess?

drcouzelis

Member

From: Connecticut, USA

Registered: 2009-11-09

Posts: 4,092

Website

Re: Understanding font configuration is a nightmare

Also, which fonts do you have installed?

pacman -Qq | egrep "(ttf-|font)" | egrep -v "(xorg|config)"

Bmdntg

Member

Registered: 2016-10-11

Posts: 34

Re: Understanding font configuration is a nightmare

This :

cantarell-fonts
gsfonts
libfontenc
libxfont2
noto-fonts
texlive-fontsextra
ttf-font-awesome
ttf-font-icons

is is the result of

pacman -Qq | egrep "(ttf-|font)" | egrep -v "(xorg|config)"

I installed many more fonts in /usr/share/fonts

Thank you for the wikipedia page, it led me to monospace fonts too.

I didn't even try to change terminal font because I couldn't find a way to do it. (And still don't understand how fonts are managed between window manager, terminal, xorg)

loqs

Member

Registered: 2014-03-06

Posts: 19,113

Re: Understanding font configuration is a nightmare

Fonts#Console_fonts covers fonts for the console this excludes all X / Wayland use
The orginal X font server is covered by Fonts#Older_applications
fontconfig is a newer font service X applications can use and I think all Wayland applications use.
Font_configuration#Replace_or_set_default_fonts covers specifying a font to use when an application requests a font name from fontconfig.
For xterm Xterm#Default_fonts