I've been trying to understand how fonts work on Debian over the last few days, and thought it might be useful to share some of the references that look especially useful and some things I think I've found out. I was inspired particularly by some problems with fonts under KDE, and I haven't fixed them yet. So I'm hardly an expert.
For what it's worth, here are some references and then summaries of some of the key points. http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2003/debian-user-200305/msg03608.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2003/debian-user-200305/msg03608.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2003/debian-user-200304/msg00643.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2003/debian-user-200306/msg03277.html http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57860 http://lists.debian.org/debian-kde/2002/debian-kde-200211/msg00345.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2003/debian-user-200306/msg02216.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2003/debian-user-200306/msg02182.html Some points I got from the discussion (I haven't necessarily verified their truth): * debian puts fonts all over in the directories * font server is not necessary for standalone workstation in XFree86 v 4 * Mozilla sometimes shows huge fonts in menus because it grabs your first font and scales it to a huge size. Solution: put fixed fonts first. (But of course this contradicts the advice elsewhere to put scalable fonts first) http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2003/debian-user-200304/msg01149.html Another theory: http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2003/debian-user-200304/msg00492.html * recent versions of Mozilla (maybe 1.3 or 1.2?) have changed their font handling * Some problems with fonts on KDE are traceable to the ~/.qt directory getting messed up or having old installation stuff in it. Deleting it sometimes help. There are some reports that installing GNOME2 (which has nothing to do with qt, AFAIK) messes with .qt. Recent version of qt, and hence KDE (c. 3.1) have changed the nameing scheme for some fonts, causing some problems (something like MS-Roman became Roman [Microsoft]). * Try Xft.autohint: 1 in .Xresources (http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2003/debian-user-200306/msg02216.html) * You need to tell the Debian XFree package that you want to manage font paths by hand in order to follow much of the advice on font management, including that in the x-ttcidfont-conf package, as far as I can tell. Also I note that XFree86 v 3 and v 4 differ considerably in font set up and handling of TT fonts. "TrueType Fonts in Debian mini-HOWTO" is v 3 era. "XFRee86 Font De-uglification HOWTO" seems to be the best single reference; it appears current and discusses v3 and v4, knows the MS no longer makes their fonts available, etc. fontconfig may be an add-on to XFree v4 facilities. If every package used it, defoma would probably be unnecessary. However, every package doesn't, and defoma provides a hook for handling those. Also, some packages (ghostscript, tex) do not assume X, so probably never will be able to use X font facilities (though it might be nice if that were an options). KDE 3 (and probably earlier) appears to require that all fonts live under the same directory tree. In particular, it assumes the TT and Type1 font top level directories are under the same parent directory. Often in Debian this is not so (e.g., the TT Debian mini-howto recommended somewhere else, I think, and at least some of the TT fonts supported by debian packages and defoma go elsewhere). P.S. Probably best to send followups just to debian-user.
