Novell LINUX ENTERPRISE SERVER 11 - ADMINISTRATION Administration Manual page 169

12.2.2 Xft
From the outset, the programmers of Xft made sure that scalable fonts including an-
tialiasing are well supported. If Xft is used, the fonts are rendered by the application
using the fonts, not by the X server as in the X11 core font system. In this way, the re-
spective application has access to the actual font files and full control of how the glyphs
are rendered. This constitutes the basis for the correct display of text in a number of
languages. Direct access to the font files is very useful for embedding fonts for printing
to make sure that the printout looks the same as the screen output.
In SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, the two desktop environments (KDE and GNOME),
Mozilla and many other applications already use Xft by default. Xft is already used by
more applications than the old X11 core font system.
Xft uses the fontconfig library for finding fonts and influencing how they are rendered.
The properties of fontconfig are controlled by the global configuration file /etc/
fonts/fonts.conf. Special configurations should be added to /etc/fonts/
local.conf and the user-specific configuration file ~/.fonts.conf. Each of
these fontconfig configuration files must begin with
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
and end with
</fontconfig>
To add directories to search for fonts, append lines such as the following:
<dir>/usr/local/share/fonts/</dir>
However, this is usually not necessary. By default, the user-specific directory ~/.fonts
is already entered in /etc/fonts/fonts.conf. Accordingly, all you need to do
to install additional fonts is to copy them to ~/.fonts.
You can also insert rules that influence the appearance of the fonts. For example, enter
<match target="font">
<edit name="antialias" mode="assign">
<bool>false</bool>
</edit>
</match>
The X Window System 155