Re: Tool for update of Xft/fontconfig font directory list?

[Toralf Lund <toralf kscanners com>]

> Toralf <toralf kscanners com> writes:
> > Does Red Hat 8.0 have a utilitiy like chkfontpath that will update the
> > list of directories searched by Xft (rather than the xfs ones)? In
> > fact, maybe the tool should be just chkfontpath, i.e. that Xft and xfs
> > paths ought to be synced. Comments?
> >
>
> We wanted to keep the two separate, since we basically didn't want a
> lot of unscalable bitmap fonts in the fontconfig search path.
Wasn't Xft-2 supposed to handle bitmap fonts?

I do miss some of them...

Apart from that, you could obviously have chkfontpath (or similar) 
register different paths with different backends according to some set of 
rules.

> chkfontpath does a bit more than just add the directory (checks for
> fonts.dir, restarts xfs). I'm not sure a command line utility is very
> useful if it just adds "<dir>/whatever</dir>" to /etc/fonts/fonts.conf
> and runs fc-cache, which is all it would do for fontconfig.
Several points here:
1. I was very frustrated when I upgraded to GNOME2/Xft and found that a 
lot of my old fonts were gone from the list, and had to spend a lot of 
time figuring out how to configure the new (more or less undocumented) 
system. chkfontpath integration would at least have saved me, and possibly 
other users, from a lot of frustration during upgrade. A suitable %post in 
the rpm might also be sufficient for this purpose, though. A separate tool 
would have been helpful if it had been made easily noticeable (e.g. via 
desktop links.)
2. If you add another font directory you usually want xfs _and_ Xft to see 
it, so you have to update two different sets of config. Being able to do 
it all using just _one_ command would obviously be a lot simpler.
3. I know some RPMs that install fonts and call chkfontpath to make them 
visible.

- Toralf