debian/README.Debian

   1 *** IMPORTANT ***
   2
   3 Recently, fontconfig changed to not include bitmapped fonts in the
   4 default font path.  There is now a Debconf question about this.
   5
   6 If you wish to enable bitmapped fonts manually, please edit
   7 /etc/fonts/local.conf, and uncomment the portion with:
   8
   9 <dir>/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts</dir>
  10
  11 in between the <fontconfig> and </fontconfig>.
  12
  13 *****************
  14
  15
  16 How fonts are handled in Debian:
  17 --------------------------------
  18
  19 Fontconfig is a library which handles font configuration and access at
  20 the system level. It is the foundation for a new font handling in X
  21 applications (but can also be useful without X).
  22
  23 Applications not using fontconfig are accessing their fonts through
  24 the X server. Font packages for these applications are named xfonts-*.
  25 You can also use TrueType fonts with these applications if you install
  26 the x-ttcidfont-conf package, which connects the X server to defoma:
  27 fonts included in ttf-* packages or added manually using dfontmgr can
  28 then be used in these programs.
  29 A few of these applications, using Xft1, can benefit of antialiasing
  30 with vector fonts, but it is deprecated.
  31
  32 The new font renderer in XFree86 is called freetype2, and applications
  33 using it access fonts on the client side. Most of them (including all
  34 GTK2/GNOME2 and KDE3 applications) do it using fontconfig, which
  35 provides listing and matching facilities for all fonts installed on the
  36 system. Any font installed in /usr/share/fonts or ~/.fonts will be
  37 accessible to these applications. This is now also true for fonts added
  38 using defoma.
  39 These programs can all benefit from antialiasing, autohinting and
  40 sub-pixel rendering. You can configure it through fontconfig, using
  41 debconf (dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig), or by editing
  42 /etc/fonts/local.conf by hand.
  43
  44  -- Josselin Mouette <joss@debian.org>  Wed,  8 Oct 2003 21:51:35 +0200