Font cleanup / organisation

mx_ · n00b Joined: 29 Sep 2017 Posts: 8

I think most people don't really care about fonts and likewise the Gentoo documentation about it is sparse (https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Fonts).
It basically says install the meta package that should cover it, whatever.

What is the best way to cleanup the installed fonts, select the best for me, install them, enable them by default (systemwide)?

Example: I never cared about the packages; I bet some of Plasma, X, Wayland, LaTeX, Libreoffice, Firefox, Chromium probably installed something; eselect fontconfig list shows over 80 fonts or font packages, some are enabled (by whom and why?), some not (why not?) and what does enable even mean for a font?

I have a MS Word document in Libreoffice and it originally uses the MS corefonts of course, which I don't have installed.
Instead I get some replacement fonts, but don't actually see which ones. So I could use the Liberation fonts by RedHat, but they only cover 3 fonts. After some research I found out that there is also a Google font package, the croscorefonts with additional ones that also cover these and more fonts and more characters.
And when I look at what emerge fonts-meta tries to pull in, I also find Open Sans "the only font you’ll ever need" under it, also developed by Google, for print, web and mobile interfaces and then there is noto too for the same purpose... what gives??

How do I find what I need, use it everywhere and get rid of the garbage?

flexibeast · Posted: Tue Mar 12, 2024 1:44 am Post subject: Re: Font cleanup / organisation

mx_ · n00b Joined: 29 Sep 2017 Posts: 8

ok, I did not see that in addition to the Fonts page a Fontconfig page exists (and that fontconfig itself exists and what its purpose is).
I was digging around in the package contents and found the config snippets and noticed how they are linked to be enabled, then went to the official fontconfig homepage to get an idea what it does, then found the Archwiki page about fonts (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/font_configuration) that explains some of the more unclear xml snippets (they usually don't contain information about what they are for, though some have quite interesting comments).

In the end I guess I have to try all the options, e.g. the sub-pixel related things. They are all disabled by default, but probably everyone has some sort of LCD.

I have some files with Japanese characters in the filename and after installing and enabling the noto-cjk font (which took quite some time to download) I saw that it was immediately used and the tofu characters were gone. So I see what fontconfig does.

One question I have now is that a couple of packages require font packages that are not enabled. For example, media-fonts/urw-fonts is required by app-text/ghostscript-gpl, but the fonts are unused:

tckosvic · n00b Joined: 18 Apr 2023 Posts: 67

To me the important thing about a font is clarity. For example, does the font allow you to distinguish between I (cap i), l ( lower case ell), and 1 (number 1). Also can you distinguish between O (cap o) and 0 (number zero) in the font. I saw an extensive video by Distro Tube a few years ago where he went through a dozen or so font families to highlight their ability to distinguish between these characters. I tried to find the source for this to give as a reference but I was unable to find it. I will post that when I come across it.

tom kosvic

flexibeast · Posted: Thu Mar 14, 2024 7:11 am Post subject:

So, what i've ended up doing is creating a "Fonts/Background" page on the wiki, and linked to it from the "Fonts" page. It's basically a braindump of stuff off the top of my head, so i'm sure there's room for improvement (and there are probably various typos etc.).

@mx_:
With that done, i'll try to come back soon to answer some more of your questions by expanding the wiki page (unless some else answers here or there first).

logrusx · Veteran Joined: 22 Feb 2018 Posts: 1537

flexibeast · Posted: Thu Mar 14, 2024 12:44 pm Post subject:

To now add to what logrusx wrote:

* If the fonts provided the `urw-fonts` package aren't enabled, you won't necessarily see any effects until something on your system makes use of the functionality of the `ghostscript-gpl` package, e.g. perhaps when printing or saving to PDF, when the 35 PostScript level 2 fonts are expected to be available. 'Ghostscript' is software to enable printing to the many printers that don't include a PostScript implementation in the hardware/firmware. The situation is similar with regards to the DejaVu fonts, which are intended to provide glyphs for a wide range of Unicode code points: until you do something that expects those fonts to be available, you're less likely to have any issues with them being disabled.

* Regarding TTF vs OTF: i'm not immediately aware of any software that can handle TTF fonts but can't handle OTF fonts. i have quite a collection of OTF fonts on my system, which i've built up over the years, and i'm yet to notice any issues using them in e.g. Scribus or LibreOffice.

* Being able to 'compile' fonts from source allows one to make small tweaks to the font, in the same way that one can patch a program to make a small change in its behaviour. i use a locally tweaked version of Inconsolata, which slightly changes the '0' (zero) glyph to include a dot in its center, to make it more visually distinguishable from a capital letter O.