Dejavu Sans not listed by xlsfonts and missing in xfontsel

[novak]

Hi everybody,

I'd like to use truetype font Dejavu Sans in the lock screen of xscreensaver. Unfortunately, this font wasn't listed by

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xlsfonts

The standard path of Dejavu Sans in Debian Wheezy is

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/usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-dejavu

I checked if this font path was available to the X server with

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xset q

, but apparently wasn't

Possible solution I found:

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sudo mkfontscale /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-dejavu
sudo mkfontdir /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-dejavu
xset fp+ "/usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-dejavu"

Then, Dejavu Sans was finally present in

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xfontsel

To add this font path permanently, I created

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/usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/04-fonts.conf

with the following content:

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Section "Files"
  FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-dejavu"
EndSection

Now my questions arise: Is it a correct way how to do it in Debian? Why aren't all truetype fonts registered with the old core X font system by default?

Thanks

[Leviathan1]

Hi,

There are different technologies for drawing fonts.

The old legacy system has bitmap fonts that are drawn by the Xserver, from the fonts available in the fontpath of the server.
This is used by xlsfonts, xfontsel...

Truetype fonts are drawn on the client side and use libraries like fontconfig, freetype, cairo ..... The X server only has to display the image data
prepared by the client. You can view these fonts with fc-list, gnome-font-viewer;./.

[kk_storm]

novak, man, thank you so much!
I was going crazy why the freshly installed fonts wouldn't appear in xlsfonts while are seen in fc-list and couldn't be used (and they were important for my OSD signals hehe)