*** IMPORTANT ***
Recently, fontconfig changed to not include bitmapped fonts in the
default font path. There is now a Debconf question about this.
If you wish to enable bitmapped fonts manually, please edit
/etc/fonts/local.conf, and uncomment the portion with:
<dir>/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts</dir>
in between the <fontconfig> and </fontconfig>.
*****************
How fonts are handled in Debian:
--------------------------------
Fontconfig is a library which handles font configuration and access at
the system level. It is the foundation for a new font handling in X
applications (but can also be useful without X).
Applications not using fontconfig are accessing their fonts through
the X server. Font packages for these applications are named xfonts-*.
You can also use TrueType fonts with these applications if you install
the x-ttcidfont-conf package, which connects the X server to defoma:
fonts included in ttf-* packages or added manually using dfontmgr can
then be used in these programs.
A few of these applications, using Xft1, can benefit of antialiasing
with vector fonts, but it is deprecated.
The new font renderer in XFree86 is called freetype2, and applications
using it access fonts on the client side. Most of them (including all
GTK2/GNOME2 and KDE3 applications) do it using fontconfig, which
provides listing and matching facilities for all fonts installed on the
system. Any font installed in /usr/share/fonts or ~/.fonts will be
accessible to these applications. This is now also true for fonts added
using defoma.
These programs can all benefit from antialiasing, autohinting and
sub-pixel rendering. You can configure it through fontconfig, using
debconf (dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig), or by editing
/etc/fonts/local.conf by hand.
-- Josselin Mouette <joss@debian.org> Wed, 8 Oct 2003 21:51:35 +0200
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