[Fontconfig] Fontconfig in Slackware 9

[Jef Oliver]

On Tuesday 13 May 2003 02:28 pm, Internet user wrote:
*snip*
>I upgraded my fontconfig to 2.2, and surprise, the
> applications works. But the fonts on my screen are not well rendered and
> in Koffice or other similar applications most of the fonts from a family
> looks the same on the screen. Not mentionig that all the "courier type
> fonts appear witha very large kening (large spaces between letters,
> expanded) What sould I do? Do I have to install other font applications?
> Where are many of my fonts from /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts? I had a lot
> and now I see just a few. How can I install Adobe type 1 fonts and to
> have it displayed correctly using fontconfig? Why is Gnome related with
> fontconfigand KDE could work without it (I could simply delete or move
> /etc/fonts and I do not have the problem of displaying fonts, but
> Mozilla and Gftp woun't work)
>
> Could you guide me also to some documentation? (please, don't do ONLY
> this.)
>
> Thank you in advance
> Cristian
> Bucharest

I have been running slackware for a few years now.  I usually don't upgrade 
between versions, jut mainly kind of follow -current and compile myself.  I 
did install Slack 9 on another box though and saw the horrid font rendering 
problems.  As it turns out, it isn't fontconfigs fault.  The default 
installation of X on Slack 9 uses the included X11 freetype sources, which 
are rather old.  On the Slack 9 install, I recompiled Freetype 
(--prefix=/usr) and then compiled the fontconfig 2.2 release 
(--prefix=/usr/X11R6) against the newly installed Freetype.  This took care 
of my font rendering problems right away.

As for the amount of fonts you had.  I am not sure on this one.  Slackware by 
default comes with few fonts.  You will need to add fonts yourself.  I 
created /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/truetype, downloaded the corefonts project 
from corefonts.sourceforge.net, and manually extract the fonts and put them 
in the truetype folder, and then issued mkfontscale and fc-cache.  After 
that, just a simple edit to the XF86Config file and I was in business.

I can't really throw any documentation your way, but I hope the above helps 
you a bit.

Jef