Contents
The installation of additional fonts in openSUSE® is very easy.
Simply copy the fonts to any directory located in the X11 font path (see
Section 12.1, “X11 Core Fonts”). To the enable use of the fonts,
the installation directory should be a subdirectory of the directories
configured in /etc/fonts/fonts.conf
(see
Section 12.2, “Xft”) or included into this file with
/etc/fonts/suse-font-dirs.conf
.
The following is an excerpt from
/etc/fonts/fonts.conf
. This file is the standard
configuration file that should be appropriate for most configurations. It
also defines the included directory
/etc/fonts/conf.d
. In this directory, all files or
symbolic links starting with a two digit number are loaded by fontconfig.
For a more detailed explanation of this functionality, have a look at
/etc/fonts/conf.d/README
.
<!-- Font directory list --> <dir>/usr/share/fonts</dir> <dir>/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts</dir> <dir>/opt/kde3/share/fonts</dir> <dir>/usr/local/share/fonts</dir> <dir>~/.fonts</dir>
/etc/fonts/suse-font-dirs.conf
is automatically
generated to pull in fonts that ship with (mostly third party)
applications like OpenOffice.org, Java or Adobe Acrobat Reader. A typical
entry would look like the following:
<dir>/usr/lib/Adobe/Reader9/Resource/Font</dir> <dir>/usr/lib/Adobe/Reader9/Resource/Font/PFM</dir>
To install additional fonts systemwide, manually copy the font files to a
suitable directory (as root
),
such as /usr/share/fonts/truetype
. Alternatively, the
task can be performed with the KDE font installer in the KDE Personal
Settings. The result is the same.
Instead of copying the actual fonts, you can also create symbolic links.
For example, you may want to do this if you have licensed fonts on a
mounted Windows partition and want to use them. Subsequently, run
SuSEconfig --module fonts
.
SuSEconfig --module fonts
executes the
script /usr/sbin/fonts-config
, which handles the font
configuration. For more information on this script, refer to its manual
page (man fonts-config
).
The procedure is the same for bitmap fonts, TrueType and OpenType fonts,
and Type1 (PostScript) fonts. All these font types can be installed into
any directory known to fonts-config
.
X.Org contains two completely different font systems: the old
and the newly designed system. The following sections briefly describe these two systems.Today, the X11 core font system supports not only bitmap fonts but also scalable fonts, like Type1 fonts, TrueType, and OpenType fonts. Scalable fonts are only supported without antialiasing and subpixel rendering and the loading of large scalable fonts with glyphs for many languages may take a long time. Unicode fonts are also supported, but their use may be slow and require more memory.
The X11 core font system has a few inherent weaknesses. It is outdated and can no longer be extended in any meaningful way. Although it must be retained for reasons of backward compatibility, the more modern Xft and fontconfig system should be used if at all possible.
For its operation, the X server needs to know which fonts are available
and where in the system it can find them. This is handled by a
FontPath
variable, which contains the path to all
valid system font directories. In each of these directories, a file named
fonts.dir
lists the available fonts in this
directory. The FontPath
is generated by the X server
at start-up. It searches for a valid fonts.dir
file
in each of the FontPath
entries in the configuration
file /etc/X11/xorg.conf
. These entries are found in
the Files
section. Display the actual
FontPath
with
xset q
. This path may also be
changed at runtime with xset. To add an additional
path, use xset +fp <path>
.
To remove an unwanted path, use xset -fp
<path>
.
If the X server is already active, newly installed fonts in mounted
directories can be made available with the command
xset fp rehash
. This command is
executed by SuSEconfig --module
fonts
. Because the command xset needs access
to the running X server, this only works if
SuSEconfig --module fonts
is
started from a shell that has access to the running X server. The easiest
way to achieve this is to acquire
root
permissions by
entering su and the root
password.
su transfers the access permissions of the user who
started the X server to the root
shell. To check if the fonts were
installed correctly and are available by way of the X11 core font system,
use the command xlsfonts to list all available fonts.
By default, openSUSE uses UTF-8 locales. Therefore, Unicode fonts
should be preferred (font names ending with iso10646-1
in xlsfonts output). All available Unicode fonts can
be listed with xlsfonts |
grep iso10646-1
. Nearly all Unicode fonts available in
openSUSE contain at least the glyphs needed for European languages
(formerly encoded as iso-8859-*
).
From the outset, the programmers of Xft made sure that scalable fonts including antialiasing are well supported. If Xft is used, the fonts are rendered by the application using the fonts, not by the X server as in the X11 core font system. In this way, the respective application has access to the actual font files and full control of how the glyphs are rendered. This constitutes the basis for the correct display of text in a number of languages. Direct access to the font files is very useful for embedding fonts for printing to make sure that the printout looks the same as the screen output.
In openSUSE, the two desktop environments (KDE and GNOME), Mozilla and many other applications already use Xft by default. Xft is already used by more applications than the old X11 core font system.
Xft uses the fontconfig library for finding fonts and influencing how
they are rendered. The properties of fontconfig are controlled by the
global configuration file /etc/fonts/fonts.conf
.
Special configurations should be added to
/etc/fonts/local.conf
and the user-specific
configuration file ~/.fonts.conf
. Each of these
fontconfig configuration files must begin with
<?xml version="1.0"?> <!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd"> <fontconfig>
and end with
</fontconfig>
To add directories to search for fonts, append lines such as the following:
<dir>/usr/local/share/fonts/</dir>
However, this is usually not necessary. By default, the user-specific
directory ~/.fonts
is already entered in
/etc/fonts/fonts.conf
. Accordingly, all you need to
do to install additional fonts is to copy them to
~/.fonts
.
You can also insert rules that influence the appearance of the fonts. For example, enter
<match target="font"> <edit name="antialias" mode="assign"> <bool>false</bool> </edit> </match>
to disable antialiasing for all fonts or
<match target="font"> <test name="family"> <string>Luxi Mono</string> <string>Luxi Sans</string> </test> <edit name="antialias" mode="assign"> <bool>false</bool> </edit> </match>
to disable antialiasing for specific fonts.
By default, most applications use the font names
sans-serif
(or the equivalent
sans
), serif
, or
monospace
. These are not real fonts but only aliases
that are resolved to a suitable font, depending on the language setting.
Users can easily add rules to ~/.fonts.conf
to
resolve these aliases to their favorite fonts:
<alias> <family>sans-serif</family> <prefer> <family>FreeSans</family> </prefer> </alias> <alias> <family>serif</family> <prefer> <family>FreeSerif</family> </prefer> </alias> <alias> <family>monospace</family> <prefer> <family>FreeMono</family> </prefer> </alias>
Because nearly all applications use these aliases by default, this affects almost the entire system. Thus, you can easily use your favorite fonts almost everywhere without having to modify the font settings in the individual applications.
Use the command fc-list to find out which fonts are
installed and available for use. For instance, the command
fc-list returns a list of all fonts. To find out which
of the available scalable fonts (:scalable=true
) contain
all glyphs required for Hebrew (:lang=he
), their font
names (family
), their style (style
),
their weight (weight
) and the name of the files
containing the fonts, enter the following command:
fc-list ":lang=he:scalable=true" family style weight
The output of this command could look like the following:
Lucida Sans:style=Demibold:weight=200 DejaVu Sans:style=Bold Oblique:weight=200 Lucida Sans Typewriter:style=Bold:weight=200 DejaVu Sans:style=Oblique:weight=80 Lucida Sans Typewriter:style=Regular:weight=80 DejaVu Sans:style=Book:weight=80 DejaVu Sans:style=Bold:weight=200 Lucida Sans:style=Regular:weight=80
Important parameters that can be queried with fc-list:
Table 12.1. Parameters of fc-list
Parameter |
Meaning and Possible Values |
---|---|
|
Name of the font family, for example, |
|
The manufacturer of the font, for example, |
|
The font style, such as |
|
The language that the font supports, for example,
|
|
The font weight, such as |
|
The slant, usually |
|
The name of the file containing the font. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Font size in pixels. In connection with fc-list, this option only makes sense for bitmap fonts. |