Novell LINUX ENTERPRISE SERVER 10 - INSTALLATION AND ADMINISTRATION 04-08-2006 Installation Manual page 504

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 It is outdated and can no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 what fonts it has 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 Files section. Display the actual FontPath with xset q. This path may also be
changed at runtime with xset. To add an additional path, use xset +fp <path>. To
remove an unwanted path, use xset -fp <path>.
If the X server is already active, newly installed fonts in mounted directories can be
made available with the command xset fp rehash. This command is executed by
SuSEconfig --module fonts. Because the command xset needs access to the
running X server, this only works if SuSEconfig --module fonts is started from
a shell that has access to the running X server. The easiest way to achieve this is to as-
sume root permissions by entering su and the root password. su transfers the access
permissions of the user who started the X server to the root shell. To check if the fonts
were installed correctly and are available by way of the X11 core font system, use the
command xlsfonts to list all available fonts.
By default, SUSE Linux Enterprise uses UTF-8 locales. Therefore, Unicode fonts should
be preferred (font names ending with iso10646-1 in xlsfonts output). All available
Unicode fonts can be listed with xlsfonts | grep iso10646-1. Nearly all
Unicode fonts available in SUSE Linux Enterprise contain at least the glyphs needed
for European languages (formerly encoded as iso-8859-*).
27.3.2 Xft
From the outset, the programmers of Xft made sure that scalable fonts including an-
tialiasing are supported well. 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-
504 Installation and Administration