not having had to mess with fonts so far, i'm curious about why the release notes seem adamant that, with the new fontconfig font scheme, you would have to add personal font files into the ~/.fonts directory when you'd have to run "fc-cache" anyway, and fc-cache takes the directory name as an argument. doesn't that suggest you can add those font files anywhere, as long as you run fc-cache appropriately? just curious.
rday
p.s. i did note that (at least on my FC2 system, FC3t2 system is still installing so it might not be the same there), the man page for fc-cache suggests to "SEE ALSO: fontconfig(3)". there is no such man page (although, as i said, this is what i'm reading on my FC2 system, so it might very well have changed for FC3t2. i just can't check that for about the next 1/2 hour.)
On Wed, 2004-09-22 at 15:04 -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
not having had to mess with fonts so far, i'm curious about why the release notes seem adamant that, with the new fontconfig font scheme, you would have to add personal font files into the ~/.fonts directory when you'd have to run "fc-cache" anyway, and fc-cache takes the directory name as an argument. doesn't that suggest you can add those font files anywhere, as long as you run fc-cache appropriately? just curious.
What fc-cache /.fonts does is update the cache in ~/.fonts. You could just run fc-cache and it would:
- Try to update the system cache directories, and fail - Update ~/.fonts
Running fc-cache on the directory directly is just a bit more efficient. The search path for fontconfig is set from /etc/fonts/fonts.conf, in this case:
<dir>~/.fonts</dir>
p.s. i did note that (at least on my FC2 system, FC3t2 system is still installing so it might not be the same there), the man page for fc-cache suggests to "SEE ALSO: fontconfig(3)". there is no such man page (although, as i said, this is what i'm reading on my FC2 system, so it might very well have changed for FC3t2. i just can't check that for about the next 1/2 hour.)
I think it's an upstream man page bug. If you want to file it in bugzilla.freedesktop.org, that would be useful. The main fontconfig docs got split into lots of little pieces.
Regards, Owen
On Wed, 22 Sep 2004, Owen Taylor wrote:
What fc-cache /.fonts does is update the cache in ~/.fonts. You could
^ "~" i'm assuming you really meant to have a "~" there
just run fc-cache and it would:
- Try to update the system cache directories, and fail
- Update ~/.fonts
Running fc-cache on the directory directly is just a bit more efficient. The search path for fontconfig is set from /etc/fonts/fonts.conf, in this case:
<dir>~/.fonts</dir>
(i suspect this is more a general FC issue than a test issue, but i started it here, so i might just as well finish it here.)
on my new FC3t2 system, i just checked /etc/fonts/fonts.conf, and the font dirs listed there are (based on a fresh install):
/usr/share/fonts /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1 /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/OTF ~/.fonts
so, i'm assuming that if i just run "fc-cache", that would update the font cache files in *all* of those dirs (well, if i run it as a normal user, it would fail for the first three due to permission violations, but succeed for the last one, right?)
if i run fc-cache with a specific directory, it will just update the font cache file in *that* directory.
if this is true, how could i add a new font directory to my system? i would have suspected just adding another directory entry to /etc/fonts/fonts.conf, but that file quite clearly says "DO NOT EDIT". and the only commands that come with the fontconfig RPM are fc-cache and fc-list -- nothing that suggests adding a new directory.
rday
p.s. i did note that (at least on my FC2 system, FC3t2 system is still installing so it might not be the same there), the man page for fc-cache suggests to "SEE ALSO: fontconfig(3)". there is no such man page (although, as i said, this is what i'm reading on my FC2 system, so it might very well have changed for FC3t2. i just can't check that for about the next 1/2 hour.)
I think it's an upstream man page bug. If you want to file it in bugzilla.freedesktop.org, that would be useful. The main fontconfig docs got split into lots of little pieces.
there are a number of bugs in the fc-cache man page.
1) reference to non-existent "fontconfig(3)" 2) reference to filename "fonts.cache" when in fact it's "fonts.cache-1" 3) no mention whatever of various fc-cache options (--verbose, --force, etc)
i'll file this stuff.