How to look at fonts before selecting

yahont

Hi!
I've got many packages with fonts for X installed. I didn't pay much attention to this ever, but my desktop looked nice.
Once after update, I've decided to select all available fonts with eselect. Now some really ugly-looking font appeared in my gnome-2.32.
Now I'd like to enable nice-looking fonts and disable ugly ones. How can I have a look at the fonts before choosing which to enable and which to disable? I mean some program which will show me alphabet displayed with all fonts i have installed?
Do you know one?
Thanx in advance.
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VoidMage · Watchman Joined: 14 Oct 2006 Posts: 6196

gucharmap should be helpful.

hardly · n00b Joined: 30 Jan 2010 Posts: 26

I always just stick with media-fonts/dejavu on systems where manual installation fonts are an issue. Archlinux with JUST FLuxbox comes to mind, but that's just has to do with the way they set their dependencies. A modern desktop should have decent fonts in the dependency tree.

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-509188-start-0.html <- Here is something.

But without looking, I would guess that something like GFontView will show fonts but not show their association to packages.
Example, the dejavu fonts are great IMO, but I wouldn't be able to tell you the names of the individual fonts included in that package, aside from a small few.

So that may help. Now you have me curious why you need so many fonts.
This may also be helpful. http://www.kev009.com/wp/2009/12/getting-beautiful-fonts-in-gentoo-linux/

HTH

[edit]
+1 for gucharmap.

yahont · Posted: Thu Jan 19, 2012 10:01 am Post subject:

Thanx for your help and useful links.
It would be nice though to have a graphical font chooser in portage instead of 'eselect fontconfig'.
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Winston Churchill

Ant P. · Watchman Joined: 18 Apr 2009 Posts: 6920

"eselect fontconfig" does not enable or disable fonts. As the name implies, it's for configuring which rendering settings, font substitutions and workarounds are enabled.

... What do you mean by "select all fonts"?

franzf · Advocate Joined: 29 Mar 2005 Posts: 4565

As a sidenote:
eselect fontconfig also configures, how your subpixels are layouted, configures hinting and so on. If you change those settings, you should know what you do.
You can try to play with the values, see what is the best default for you.