Re: Fonts in XQuartz
Re: Fonts in XQuartz
- Subject: Re: Fonts in XQuartz
- From: "Richard L. Hamilton" <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 08 Jun 2018 21:12:12 -0400
> On Jun 8, 2018, at 15:00, email@hidden wrote:
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> Today's Topics:
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> 1. Fonts in XQuartz (William Westfield)
> 2. Re: Fonts in XQuartz (JF Mezei)
>
>
>
> From: William Westfield <email@hidden>
> Subject: Fonts in XQuartz
> Date: June 8, 2018 at 04:56:46 EDT
> To: email@hidden
>
>
> Is there a FAQ or guide for font management in XQuartz somewhere?
> Searching the web in general seems to yield conflicting and/or old
> information about things like whether Quartz will pick up fonts added with
> “Font Book”, which directories are in use (I guess Xquartz has different
> paths than linux X11?), and which utilities are relevant…
>
> Thanks
> Bill W
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> From: JF Mezei <email@hidden>
> Subject: Re: Fonts in XQuartz
> Date: June 8, 2018 at 13:31:30 EDT
> To: email@hidden
>
>
> On 2018-06-08 04:56, William Westfield wrote:
>> Is there a FAQ or guide for font management in XQuartz somewhere?
>
>
> To further the OP's question:
>
> What is the magic incantation to add to .Xresources such that Xterm will
> default to "TrueType" fonts ?
>
> Secondly, when node1-client pops an Xterm on node2-server, and the user
> selects "TrueType" fonts in the contextual menu, why does it take a
> long while to happen? Shouldn't the fonts come locally from node2 ?
>
> And does the X11 package open a font server process by default? (aka:
> node2 asks node1 for the TrueType fonts for the Xterm it popped onto node2)
>
X11 fonts are found in directories in the font path. That presumably has some
initial hardcoded default, but is subsequently set by use of the xset command,
e.g.
xset fp+ /Library/Fonts
xset q
will show (near the bottom of its output of all the current values of various
settings it can control) the current font path
xset fp+ path
will add to the end of it
xset +fp path
will add to the beginning of it
and
xset fp= path
will replace the font path with a new one.
Every directory in the font path needs to have a fonts.dir file that lists the
X11 names of the fonts (including the long style names). If it has scalable
fonts, it will also
have a fonts.scale file, and it may have a fonts.alias file (assigning
additional or compatibility names to fonts defined in fonts.dir). The
fonts.scale file is usually
created with the mkfontscale command; then fonts.dir is created with the
mkfontdir command (which only processes bitmap fonts, but adds the contents of
an existing
fonts.scale command to its output; so you want to run mkfontscale BEFORE
mkfontdir). The X server will not see font files that are not listed in the
fonts.dir file in a
directory on the font path. mkfontscale may complain a bit about sufficiently
unusual fonts; sometimes one ends up tweaking the file by hand a bit (the first
line of
fonts.dir or fonts.scale files is the number of subsequent lines; that needs to
be adjusted if one adds or removes lines). AFAIK, FontBook does NOT create
fonts.scale and/or fonts.dir files, nor update them; you have to do that
yourself. If you want directories added to the font path automatically, you
also have to find
a startup file to add appropriate xset fp+ commands to; a new file added to
~/.xinitrc.d/ will probably do fine for an individual user (filename ending in
.sh, and with
a mode that makes it executable). I have a file there that adds
/usr/local/lib/fonts (containing mostly symlinks to files in /Library/Fonts,
with spaces in the names
changed to underlines, because a filename with a space in it won't work with
fonts.dir). I don't know when that was provided; heck, I might have done it
myself,
although I doubt that; but I suspect I added a few files to that directory at
some point. If there's a script that will update /usr/local/lib/fonts from
/Library/Fonts, I
don't know where it is.
AFAIK, XQuartz etc do not start a font server process. That's not generally
necessary for local fonts; but if one wants to display back clients from
elsewhere, it
may be good to have an entry in the font path for the font server (if there is
one) on the remote system, in case the client uses fonts available there but
not on your
display server; for system HOSTNAME, that would usually look like
tcp/HOSTNAME:7100
You could alter some script (or create a launchd plist, I suppose) to start a
local font server if you found that desirable for some reason. The font server
has its own
configuration file that effectively tells it what to use as its own font path.
All those commands (xset, mkfontdir, mkfontscale, and xfs (the font server))
have man pages.
For apps that handle font rendering via the X11 server, they use the fonts via
the X11 server, NOT locally. Only apps that use newer toolkits (e.g. NOT
xterm) may handle
font rendering themselves, and thus expect some access to fonts other than what
I've described above.
There are multiple versions of xterm, and different compilation options (xterm
also has a man page). I'm not going to even attempt to describe how to
configure it; I'll
leave that for someone else, or as an exercise for the reader, because the
details and capabilities may vary according to what version they're running,
etc.
That was almost entirely off the top of my head, so I don't promise I got
everything right. :-)
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