Re: Font references and info
On -3389-Wed, Jul 09, 2003 at 10:22:19PM -0700, Steven Yap <syap@shaw.ca> spake thus,
> On Wed, 2003-07-09 at 20:34, Aaron wrote:
> > On -3359-Wed, Jul 09, 2003 at 08:44:02PM +0200, David Fokkema
> > <dfokkema@ileos.nl> spake thus,
> > >
> > > I'll have to take some time to understand fonts. I really don't have a
> > > clue... For example, in Knoppix, openoffice.org uses a font for the
> > > menus etc. that looks quite good, while in my Sid, it looks ugly as
> > > hell.
>
> To get OpenOffice to use a nice anti-aliased font for the application
> menus and such, you need to do something rather non-obvious.
I actually don't even use OpenOffice.org myself. I'm more concerned
with fonts for viewing websites and such. (e.g. TTFs).
[snip]
>
> I let defoma manage the fonts installed on my sid installation. When
> you do that, the your FontPath for TrueType fonts should contain
> something like "/var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d/dirs/TrueType".
>
> So far, all of the fonts I use, and need, have debian packages for
> them. Installing them automatically registers the fonts with defoma
> and makes them available to applications.
>
> Xft and FreeType are not font servers.
>
> Xft is a client-side font API for X11 applications. I believe bitmap
> fonts are not made available by default through Xft. Come to think of
> it, I'm not even sure if bitmap fonts can be made available through
> Xft. /etc/fonts/fonts.conf is the configuration file for fontconfing
> and it determines what fonts are available to applications through the
> Xft API.
I don't really care about bitmap fonts, but I am still very unclear
how X11 is made aware of the availability of the FreeType fonts. My
understanding was that FreeType could rasterize TTFs on request so
that the application thinks it's dealing with a bitmap or pixmap or
what have you, when in fact it was derived from a TTF.
Yet "verdana" doesn't appear in any of my available font lists in
various applications (xfontsel, openoffice.org). I just want to know
what I'm doing wrong.
>
> Xft uses the fontconfig mechanism to select fonts. To render the
> selected fonts, Xft uses the standard X11 drawing protocol. If the
> Render extension is available, that will be used to accelerate the
> rendering and reduce network traffic.
>
> See http://fontconfig.org/ for more on Xft and fontconfig
>
> FreeType is a TrueType font renderer. This is the module you load in
> the XF86Config-4 file.
I have that module loaded yet it doesn't appear to be doing anything
for me.
>
> Hope this shed some light.
>
> --
> Steven Yap <syap@shaw.ca>
--
Aaron Bieber
-
Graphic Design // Web Design
http://www.core-dev.com/
aaron@core-dev.com
Reply to: