Arch Linux

PingFloyd

Member

Registered: 2006-08-19

Posts: 25

need a bit of clarification about fonts

I think I might have a pretty good understanding of how to add and remove fonts to Xorg7, but there is a few little details that I'm not completely clear about.  I think I may know the answer, but am hoping to get some confirmation/clarification.

Am I right in thinking, that anytime a directory that contains fonts is changed, that mkfontdir, mkfontscale, and fc-cache should be run against it?  Even when there already exists a fonts.dir and fonts.scale?

For example, say I add some fonts to /usr/share/fonts/TTF, and remove some fonts from /usr/share/fonts/100dpi.  Would I then do the following?

# mkfontscale /usr/share/fonts/100dpi /usr/share/fonts/TTF
# mkfontsdir /usr/share/fonts/100dpi /usr/share/fonts/TTF
# fc-cache /usr/share/fonts/100dpi /usr/share/fonts/TTF

Also I am assume that there must be a line in the xorg.conf that reflects the path to every font directory on the system that I want to use regardless of the type of font(eg. Fontpath "/usr/share/fonts/foo-fonts").  Is this correct?

Also, does it matter what order I run those three programs listed above?

Is there anything I'm overlooking?

Is it necessary to do any of this when adding or removing fonts via pacman (eg. after running "pacman -S ttf-ms-fonts").

One thing I'm really confused about is encoding.  Am I supposed to have an "encodings.dir" file in each one of my font directories?  I've noticed that there is an "encodings" directory in /usr/share/fonts (/usr/share/fonts/encodings).  So whenever I run mkfontdir, should I do it as "mkfontdir -e /usr/share/fonts/encoding /path/to/fonts"?  Or is mkfontdir defaulting to doing that and puting these encodings.dir, for each font directory, in the encodings directory by default through the use of an environmental variable?

peterk0

Member

Registered: 2006-07-19

Posts: 34

Re: need a bit of clarification about fonts

You assume correctly that each time you change something in your font dirs, you have to run fc-cache. However you don't have to have a FontPath in your xorg.conf anymore for each font dir, it will find all fonts in /usr/share/fonts.
I can't help you with encondings, but there is a little trick about fonts lately, which can be little confusing at the begining. There is a fonts conf.d dir located in /etc/fonts/conf.d where you can set various things about fonts just by making a symbolic link to one of the file already there. For example bitstream fonts are off by default and therefore you won't be able to see some fonts if you install them, just because of this fact. You'll have to link the correct file to turn them on etc.

Hope it helps a little 

JGC

Developer

Registered: 2003-12-03

Posts: 1,664

Re: need a bit of clarification about fonts

running fc-cache on a specific fontdir isn't good as we noticed a while ago in most font packages on archlinux. When you add a new subdirectory in /usr/share/fonts, it won't get indexed by the main fonts.cache-1 file, so you should run fc-cache or fc-cache -f. The mkfontdir/mkfontscale operations are good to do on a specific fontdir.

Check the .install files for fonts like ttf-bitstream-vera to get an idea of what to do for all fonts.