Defoma

[John Lowell]

I have a very basic Debian system installed: base packages, x-window system, fluxbox, a system monitor, links for downloads, firefox for browsing, thunderbird foe e-mail. The fonts that come with firefox and Thunderbird in Debian - out of the box at least - are minimal and, to my tastes, unacceptable. Elemental fonts such as helvetica just aren't there. Neither are other commonly employed fonts such as arial and lucida.

I've taken a lot of time to research the Debian approach to fonts hoping to find a way to get an overview. I've looked at the man pages for defoma, defoma-app, etc., and understand them on their face, but these seem more descriptions that guides. I've googled and schmoogled looking for some independent "How-To" to  provide context for these man pages but can find nothing helpful. My experience with fonts in other distros seems of no value either. It's clearly not simply a matter of installing the fonts you want and running fc-cache -fv. Fonts already installed and visible in xfontsel are just not there for firefox and thunderbird. Where does one start with defoma, with the applications, with the fonts, what are the steps, the order to things here? Minimally, I'd like to make lucida and helvetica available to firefox and thunderbird. Might someone help?

Regards.

jlowell