Figuring Out the Font System on Linux Desktops?

koreth asks: "Last year I switched to Debian sarge on my office desktop machine. For the most part it's been great, but I can't seem to wrap my brain around fonts. For example, my favorite programming font is Sheldon Narrow. After running it through a few conversion tools and copying it to various font directories, I was able to start using it in xterm. But no sign of it in Konsole, despite running it through KDE's font installer tool. A few times I've installed new fonts that appear in the font lists of GNOME apps but not KDE apps or vice versa, and it's unclear to me how either environment's fonts interact with what I see when I run 'xlsfonts'. I have yet to find any documentation describing how either GNOME or KDE decides which fonts it likes. And then there's Debian's 'defoma', which seems to interact with everything somehow. Are there any good resources out there for learning what's going on under the hood of a modern Linux desktop environment's font subsystem?"

Comments

The story of a keypress become a pixel

[porttikivi]

I have toyed with an idea of a story, which starts from a keypress, goes on to keyboard driver, Unix tty subsystem and character coding. One story line branches to the handling of characters in the console subsystem and its fonts (in ROM or somewhere else?). The frame buffer and a graphical console are another avenue that needs to be handled. Finally the glorious or ("goreous") story line branches to X client, X primitives, X server, X character coding, X font files, X rendering, X color maps and resolutions and finally to screen pixel technology.

Especially the FILES section of the story would be interesting. I would like to see a complete list of all possible configuration files and font files which can have an effect on a character/font you see on your screen when you press a key. We can limit ourselves to a case of a dozen well-known applications.

KDE is Krufty

[Rocketship Underpant]

KDE does not "just work" as you say. I've spent some time with current Suse and Mandrake distros and given up after being unable to get fonts properly recognized.

One big problem is that KDE's font manager (whatever it's called) doesn't recognize font families and font relationships properly. So if I installed something with book, medium, bold, extra bold, italic, and so on, only one of those fonts (at random) would usually show up in an application. Gee, it's really great to be limited to the bold italic of every font family I install.

Also, Linux needs a proper Unicode or AAT engine. I don't think it has one yet, since I've never gotten the special features of Unicode fonts to work.

(So yes, I gave up and bought a Mac.)