Re: GTK+3 fonts

[Roger Davis <rbd soest hawaii edu>]

Hi all,

OK, I've made some progress based on everyone's suggestions, and focused 
my questions a bit more, I think.

Copying the Deja*.ttf files into /opt/X11/share/fonts/TTF *did* make a 
difference, and they are now seen by my apps, but this fact was 
momentarily obscured by one of my remaining problems, namely that when I 
downsize my font display to smaller sizes (anything 16 or below), the font 
weight appears to make a dramatic shift from Book to ExtraLight. This 
happens on the Mac but not on CentOS. Anyone know why this is happening 
and if there is a way to prevent it?

Second, at some point during my fiddling around this morning, the 
following files magically appeared in /opt/X11/share/fonts/TTF:

% ls -l fo*
120 -rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel  57364 Oct 21 06:52 fonts.dir
  8 -rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel   1962 Oct 21 06:51 fonts.list
120 -rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel  57364 Oct 21 06:51 fonts.scale

I don't believe I did anything other than copy some ttf files into this 
directory and run fc-match and fc-list a few times. Does anyone know how 
these get created, and is their presence critical to anything, 
particularly any kind of font lookup procedure? It's quite possible that 
they were there before I started tweaking things, but their modification 
times have clearly been updated, and the fonts.list file now contains 
references to the new DejaVuSans fonts.

Finally, I did some experimenting with removing ttf files from 
/opt/X11/share/fonts/TTF. I found that if I got rid of the Vera*ttf files, 
then this happened:

% fc-match Sans
DejaVuSans.ttf: "DejaVu Sans" "Book"

And if I put them back, things are restored as before:

% fc-match Sans
Vera.ttf: "Bitstream Vera Sans" "Roman"

Can anyone explain how this works? Is there some complicated font 
parameter examination taking place here, or is it as simple, at least in 
some cases, as a single defined fallback font for everything when a 
specified font cannot be located? Curiously, this test returns the same 
fallback font:

% fc-match yuk-yuk
Vera.ttf: "Bitstream Vera Sans" "Roman"

I suppose what I would like to do on my Mac is have it use DejaVu Sans to 
satisfy a Sans request (because DejaVu has the UTF-8 characters I need and 
Vera does not), but without having to delete the Vera fonts from my 
system, which might break God-knows-what-all. Is there a way to do this?

Thanks!

Roger