Novell LINUX ENTERPRISE SERVER 10 SP2 - INSTALLATION AND ADMINISTRATION Installation Manual page 510

The X11 core font system has a few inherent weaknesses. It is outdated and can no
longer be extended in a meaningful way. 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 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-*).
26.2.2 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-
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
492 Installation and Administration