Where should the modular X11R7 fonts get installed to?

[Owen Taylor]

On Sun, 2005-11-06 at 11:28 -0500, Mike A. Harris wrote:
> Matthew Miller wrote:
> > On Sun, Nov 06, 2005 at 10:13:06AM -0500, Mike A. Harris wrote:
> > 
> >>I'm currently of the opinion that we should install the X.Org
> >>fonts into "/usr/share/fonts/X11", to have them installed into
> >>an FHS compliant location, but also in their own namespace, thus
> >>avoiding conflicts with other packages.
> > 
> > 
> > I think this is nicest. I like it more than the /usr/share/X11/fonts
> > alternative, because if one is looking for "what's part of X"? I think one
> > is more likely to ask rpm; if one is looking for "where are all the various
> > the font files", it's handy for them to be under one obvious place.
> 
> I agree, however there's an additional complication involved that
> I hadn't thought of before.  In Fedora Core 4 and earlier, the
> fontconfig subsystem was only preconfigured to use the following
> font directories:
> 
>          <dir>/usr/share/fonts</dir>
>          <dir>/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1</dir>
>          <dir>/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/OTF</dir>
>          <dir>~/.fonts</dir>
> 
> Fontconfig is recursive, meaning it will find all fonts in all
> subdirectories of what is listed in fonts.conf.
> 
> I believe Owen, or whoever set up our default fonts.conf configuration,
> intentionally selected only the above specific /usr/X11R6 font
> directories, in order to pick up the scaleable Type1 and OTF fonts
> that come with X, intentionally excluding all of the ugly bitmap
> fonts and other weirdo fonts from being seen by fontconfig.

Yes, that's the case. It's pretty much a disaster if a web page
configured to have Helvetica specifically as a font comes up with
the bitmap Helvetica rather than Nimbus Sans.

Keith has been promoting an alternate solution to the bitmap font
problem - configuring fontconfig to exclude *all* bitmap fonts , but
that doesn't really work for us -- we *want* the bitmap fonts in
bitmap-fonts. (At least a couple of years ago, there was a 
passionate attachment to MiscFixed.)

A different way of going about excluding fonts would be to use
the <rejectfont> mechanism ... see the description of rejectfont
in /usr/share/doc/fontconfig-<version>/fontconfig-user.{txt,html}
and /etc/fonts/conf.d/40-blacklist-fonts.conf for an example
that where we are using it to reject certain of the the Hershey 
fonts which were causing FreeType indigestion.

> If we put all of the fonts into /usr/share/fonts, then fontconfig
> will see all of them now, and this might cause you to get a different
> font than you expected for a given name, whereas fontconfig would
> not have seen them all before.
> 
> Another possible problem, is that I'm not sure if fontconfig/Xft
> support all of the font types that are supported by the core fonts
> system.

This shouldn't be a problem ... if fontconfig doesn't understand
something it will ignore it.

> Note that these are currently only theoretical problems.  I don't
> know if there should be a real concern for these issues or not, as
> I haven't tested anything yet.

We definitely can't drop the full set of X11 fonts right into the
default configuration. The problems will be far from theoretical.
But they should be fixable.

Regards,
					Owen

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