Re: GTK+3 fonts

[Liam R E Quin <liam holoweb net>]

On Sun, 2012-10-21 at 09:58 -1000, Roger Davis wrote:
>  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.

By default I believe the mac changes antialiasing and hinting strategies
(is this 16pt or 16px?)

> 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
mkfontscale does this (and/or mkfontdir)

The files are being ignored in practice by gtk. They are for legacy
applications that still use X-native font machinery, and are read by the
X server and by the X font server, if it's in use. It shouldn't be.


> 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 yuk-yuk
> Vera.ttf: "Bitstream Vera Sans" "Roman"

Yes, there's a fallback defined in one of he fonts.conf files.

> 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)

The pango renderer will try to substitute glyphs from other fonts as
needed, so this shouldn't be a problem. It's possible that some other
gtk+ back end doesn't do this.

You can edit the fonts.conf files to change the default font.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml