Linux FAQ's & Manuals


installing additional fonts

suse linux already comes with a reasonable selection of fonts for all supported languages. but due to the limited space on the media, not all available free fonts can be included. and some nice fonts cannot be included because of license problems, although you can download them yourself for free for personal use. if you are looking for more fonts which can be downloaded and used legally for free, ed trager's page ``unicode font guide for free/libre open source operating systems'' may be helpful.

now how are additional fonts installed on suse linux?

this is very easy since suse linux > = 8.2. if your suse linux system is older, read section 5.6.1 first and come back here.

to install new fonts on suse linux > = 8.2 to do the following as root:

you may need to restart your x-server, ``suseconfig'' tries to call ``xset fp rehash'' but depending on how you became root to do the font installation, this may fail because root may not have access to the x-server. if the font server ``xfs'' is running, ``suseconfig'' will also tell ``xfs'' to reload its config file.

if you use an application which uses fonts via xft/fontconfig (see section 5.1.1), for example kde, you may need to restart it to get access to the new fonts.

if you want to put your new fonts into a new directory, make sure to add the new directory to the font paths for the x11 core fonts in /etc/x11/xf86config (or to the ``catalogue'' variable in /etc/x11/fs/config if you use the font server ``xfs''). if your new directory is not a sub-directory of the directories listed in /etc/fonts/fonts.conf, add your new directory to that list as well (see section 5.1.1).

it doesn't matter much which types of fonts you want to install, the procedure is the same for bitmap fonts, truetype/opentype fonts, and type1 fonts. you can put any of these fonts into any font directory you like. only cid-keyed fonts are a little bit special, see section 5.4.

if you use yast2 to install new font packages, you do not even have to call ``suseconfig'', yast2 does that automatically after installing anything.

that's basically all.

you only need to read on if you want to understand in more detail what happens when calling ``suseconfig --module fonts'', which may be necessary if you don't like some of the entries which are automatically generated into the ``fonts.dir'' and ``fonts.scale'' files and want to override them with your own, hand-tuned entries.

``suseconfig --module fonts'' calls the script ``/sbin/conf.d/suseconfig.fonts'' which calls the perl-script ``fonts-config which does the actual work of setting up the fonts.

for details about what ``fonts-config'' does, please have a look at its manual page

     man fonts-config 

which i reproduce here for your convenience. it also describes how to supply your own entries for ``fonts.scale''.

for even more details you can read the source of the ``fonts-config'' script.



subsections
2005-03-09