Font Management in Linux, Part 1

By: Carla Schroder
Thursday, October 18, 2007 10:35:49 AM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/tutorials/6428/1/

Font Perils

Fonts in Linux are crazy. Most Linux distributions ship with a big blob of serif, sans serif, and monospaced fonts, and there's barely a pixel's worth of difference between them.

Fonts on computers are crazy. Sometimes I pine for the olden days of swapping out the type balls on IBM Selectric typewriters to get different fonts. You always knew what you were getting with those.

Many fonts are copyrighted, so you cannot legally copy them and give them away to all of your friends. Some applications come with their own sets of fonts and rendering libraries. The GIMP does this because it thinks it can handle fonts more competently than your X server; it uses FreeType and Pango. OpenOffice.org also comes with its own set of fonts, for what reasons I know not.

The good news is your system is probably already set up to share all these fonts system-wide, and FreeType and Fontconfig are becoming standard. So the GIMP and OpenOffice.org can use your system fonts, and other applications can use the GIMP and OpenOffice.org fonts. If this is not so you can easily fix it. Just find the directories where the fonts are stored and add them to /etc/fonts/conf.avail/51-local.conf. Then, as root, run fc-cache to rebuild the fonts cache. Et voilá, and done! Some howtos say to edit /etc/fonts/fonts.conf, but you shouldn't do this. local.conf is for your own customizations, and /fonts.conf will be overwritten when Fontconfig is updated.

There is one more peril: duplicate fonts in different font formats. if you have the same font in two different formats, you'll get inconsistent behavior. There can be only one.

Font Formats De-Mystified

The three main font formats are TrueType, OpenType, and PostScript. TrueType fonts have a .ttf extension on Linux/Unix, Windows, and Mac OS X, plus .ttc on the Mac. TrueType fonts scale up and down in size gracefully without jagged edges or inconsistencies in line thickness; you don't need a separate file for each size, but only for different styles like italic or bold.

PostScript fonts need two files each: .afm is the screen font, and .pfb is the printer font. This is specific to Linux and Unix; Windows PostScript fonts are .pfm and .pfb. Mac OS X handles PostScript fonts in a number of different ways that I don't even want to get entangled in, involving suitcases and forks and other oddments.

OpenType is a newer font format developed jointly by Microsoft and Adobe, their "can't we all just get along" format. Its file extension is .otf, and it works on both Windows and Mac.

Bitmap fonts are an old format. You need a separate font file for each size and style, so as you can imagine hardly anyone uses them anymore.

Most Linuxes these days come with both TrueType and PostScript Type 1 fonts. Finicky desktop publishers insist on using PostScript fonts with genuine PostScript printers, but these are becoming rare. Most printers support some form of PostScript emulation. Ghostscript is a PostScript interpreter that comes standard on most Linux distributions, so you should always be able to read and print PostScript documents.

Font Managers

Linux is lacking in good font managers. KDE's font installer is decent; it finds and displays the fonts on your system that Fontconfig knows about, and installs and removes fonts. It also displays the font type, and you can print a catalogue of all fonts or selected fonts. Use Ctrl+left-click to select non-contiguous fonts, and Shift+left-click to select a batch of contiguous fonts. Each font takes up two lines, so you can cram a lot onto a single page. On ordinary KDE you'll find the font installer in kcontrol. Kubuntu puts it in System Settings -> Appearance.

Gnome users can go into Nautilus, navigate to the folders that hold TrueType fonts, and click on individual fonts to generate a preview. But it won't work for other font formats. OpenOffice.org Writer and KWord both have nice font previewers, so at least you can quickly see what they look like.

Ubuntu Fonts: The Horror

Ubuntu installs over 200 fonts, the majority of them foreign-language fonts that only the most gifted linguist would ever be able to use. They're useless anyway since most of them don't render correctly. Those odd-looking ae_ fonts that have so many Ubuntu users scratching their heads? Those are all part of the ttf-arabeyes package. A quick way to find out which package a font belongs to is using the locate command to search on the font name: 

$ locate -i ae_cortoba
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-arabeyes/ae_Cortoba.ttf

Go into Adept or Synaptic, search for installed fonts, and you'll see at a glance which ones are relevant to you. Do not remove:

  • Any xfonts or xfont utilities
  • x-tccidfont-conf
  • ttf-opensymbol
  • ttf-dejavu
  • anything that starts with lib
  • fontconfig
  • defoma
  • anything that starts with console
  • gsfonts

Come back next week to learn how to get detailed information on fonts, finding and installing interesting new fonts, and how to create your own.

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