Gentoo Fonts

How I set up X and XFS on Gentoo?

Author: M Butcher
Date: 2003-11-12 16:55:36 -0600

I wanted to use X with the X Font Server. Additionally, I wanted to use the freetype and sharetype fonts, as well as some TTF fonts that I bought a while back.

First of all, I edited /etc/X11/XF86Config to include the XFS server in it\'s fontpath. XFS is running only as a UNIX server, so the font string looked like this:

FontPath  \"unix/:-1\"

I commented out the other fonts, but that is unnecessary.

I added my fonts to the appropriate directories, which worked out to be:

/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/freefont
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/sharefont
/usr/share/fonts/ttf/matt

The freefont and sharefont ebuilds already created the fonts.dir files, so I skipped that step for both of those. The true type fonts, however, were added by hand to the ttf/matt dir, so I had to emerge x11-misc/ttmkfdir. Once that was done, I followed the simple proceedure for building the fonts.dir:

cd /usr/share/fonts/ttf/matt
ttmkfdir > fonts.dir

With that done, all I had to do was set the correct font paths in the xfs config files, which are in /etc/X11/fs/config. The end result of the pertinent part of the file looked something like this:

catalogue = /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi,
        /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi,
        /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Speedo,
        /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1,
        /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Speedo,
        /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/truetype,
        /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/freefont,
        /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/sharefont,
        /usr/share/fonts/ttf/matt

From here, the only task was to restart X and XFS.

Feb 27, 2002