Scalable fonts are not loaded into the X server database
I have some old X11 applications complain that they cannot find a ISO8859-2 font. So I executed
grep -r 8859-2 /usr/share/fonts/
and, to my surprise, found many matches, for example
==> /usr/share/fonts/dejavu/fonts.dir <==
DejaVuSans.ttf -misc-dejavu sans-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-2
DejaVuSansCondensed-Bold.ttf -misc-dejavu sans condensed-bold-r-semicondensed--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-2
DejaVuSansCondensed-BoldOblique.ttf -misc-dejavu sans condensed-bold-o-semicondensed--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-2
==> /usr/share/fonts/unifont/fonts.dir <==
unifont.ttf -misc-unifont-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-2
The same lines are also present in the respective fonts.scale file.
However, Xlsfonts finds no such fonts,
$ xlsfonts -fn '-misc-dejavu sans-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-2'
xlsfonts: pattern "-misc-dejavu sans-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-2" unmatched
$ xlsfonts -o -fn '-misc-dejavu sans-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-2'
xlsfonts: pattern "-misc-dejavu sans-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-2" unmatched
$ xlsfonts -fn '*-iso8859-2'
xlsfonts: pattern "*-iso8859-2" unmatched
even though /usr/share/fonts/dejavu is in the font path as per xset q.
I followed Arch Wiki: X Logical Font Description closely, but I just don't get the expected result. What am I missing?
Since those scalable fonts are .tff, while the classic bitmap ones are .pcf, I looked for more information on Truetype fonts and found several references (1, 2, 3) that suggest to add the freetype module to /etc/X11/xorg.conf:
Section "Module"
Load "freetype"
EndSection
I did so and restarted the X server, but still no scalable fonts.
1 answer
Further digging led me to this post on the FreeBSD forum, in which a user says that
The functionality of the freetype module is contained in the libXfont library.
And sure enough I managed to get scalable XLFDs by enabling the truetype USE flag for libXfont2 and recompiling it.
The effect of the flag, "use media-libs/freetype [another package] for font rasterization", indicates that rendering a Truetype core font is nowadays outsourced to another piece of software. This is reinforced by some reports (1, 2) that the module got removed from Xorg; Indeed, the freetype module line in xorg.conf seems to do nothing at all and I deleted it without any noticeable effect.
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