Arch Linux

balance

Member

Registered: 2017-02-17

Posts: 64

i3 doesn't work with xorg fonts

Hi,

so I have a fresh arch install. I basically only installed vim and networkmanager as well as xorg-server and some drivers. Part of xorg-server is the xorg-font package, which gives us some fonts. Now I read somewhere, that those fonts aren't the best and might lead to problems when used in e.g. an GUI application. So maybe that's what's going on here, maybe it tries to load a font that doesn't exist or maybe I just do something wrong.

i3 currently looks  something like this https://i.imgur.com/S03Dcin.jpg if I try to open a terminal I get that "You don't have any terminal emulator' warning at the top. (Not surprising, since I don't have installed any terminal emulator yet) but that text basically displays as rectangles.

My .xinitrc only contains 'exec i3'. I tried to use xset xset +fp /usr/share/fonts/100dpi/ without success.

I'm terrible at X. I wanted to check what font is using xset but I can't figure out how I get the display if I'm logged into the system on a different tty. So e.g. i3 is running on tty1 and I log into tty2.

I know that installing a "proper" font fixes the problem. I'm just curious here.

Edit: As far as I know, xorg-fonts are installed in /usr/share/fonts/{100dpi, 75dpi, encodings, util}. If I install e.g. ttf-dejavu it gets installed in /usr/share/fonts/TTF. Now I don't know how i3 get's its fonts and how that exactly realtes to X but I guess that i3 just doesn't look into those folders but it does look into TTF? Or maybe just looks for .ttf?

Last edited by balance (2020-09-07 16:01:17)

progandy

Member

Registered: 2012-05-17

Posts: 5,321

Re: i3 doesn't work with xorg fonts

Edit: i3 should also support X font descriptors, but might default to pango. You can try to set that in the configuration: https://build.i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html#fonts

i3 can also use pango/fontconfig to search and display fonts. Modern pango cannot use X11 bitmap fonts, only OpenType/TrueType fonts (that includes otb opentype bitmap fonts)

Last edited by progandy (2020-09-07 16:47:52)

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| alias CUTF='LANG=en_XX.UTF-8@POSIX ' | alias ENGLISH='LANG=C.UTF-8 ' |

balance

Member

Registered: 2017-02-17

Posts: 64

Re: i3 doesn't work with xorg fonts

ah so but I'd actually have to configure it explicitly, thanks. So in my case above it actually looked for something that didn't exist, thus the weird looks.