Post History

Further digging led me to [this post on the FreeBSD forum][3], 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][1] 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][5], [2][6]) 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.

[1]: https://packages.gentoo.org/useflags/truetype
[3]: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/xorg-conf-freetype-module.37459/
[5]: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/load-freetype-module.63973/
[6]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2009/07/msg01855.html