Novell LINUX ENTERPRISE SERVER 10 - INSTALLATION AND ADMINISTRATION 11-05-2007 Installation Manual page 507

To install additional fonts systemwide, manually copy the font files to a suitable direc-
tory (as root), such as /usr/share/fonts/truetype. Alternatively, the task
can be performed with the KDE font installer in the KDE Control Center. The result is
the same.
Instead of copying the actual fonts, you can also create symbolic links. For example,
you may want to do this if you have licensed fonts on a mounted Windows partition
and want to use them. Subsequently, run SuSEconfig --module fonts.
SuSEconfig --module fonts executes the script /usr/sbin/
fonts-config, which handles the configuration of the fonts. To see what this script
does, refer to the manual page of the script (man fonts-config).
The procedure is the same for bitmap fonts, TrueType and OpenType fonts, and Type1
(PostScript) fonts. All these font types can be installed in any directory.
X.Org contains two completely different font systems: the old X11 core font system
and the newly designed Xft and fontconfig system. The following sections briefly de-
scribe these two systems.
26.2.1 X11 Core Fonts
Today, the X11 core font system supports not only bitmap fonts but also scalable fonts,
like Type1 fonts, TrueType, and OpenType fonts. Scalable fonts are only supported
without antialiasing and subpixel rendering and the loading of large scalable fonts with
glyphs for many languages may take a long time. Unicode fonts are also supported, but
their use may be slow and require more memory.
The X11 core font system has a few inherent weaknesses. It is outdated and can no
longer be extended in a meaningful fashion. Although it must be retained for reasons
of backward compatibility, the more modern Xft and fontconfig system should be used
if at all possible.
For its operation, the X server needs to know which fonts are available and where in
the system it can find them. This is handled by a FontPath variable, which contains the
path to all valid system font directories. In each of these directories, a file named fonts
.dir lists the available fonts in this directory. The FontPath is generated by the X
server at start-up. It searches for a valid fonts.dir file in each of the FontPath
entries in the configuration file /etc/X11/xorg.conf. These entries are found in
The X Window System 489