Does anyone really understand Linux fonts?

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Guido
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Joined: Sat Nov 10, 2018 4:21 pm

Does anyone really understand Linux fonts?

#1 Post by Guido »

I've been looking for something/someone who can tell me how we get from font descriptions to what I assume are font bitmaps adjusted to resolution to what I presume is compositing. There are many libraries and utilities, but nowhere is there a good explanation as to the steps and what packages they go through. I'm really only concerned about XFCE at this point, but I suspect there may be multiple solutions in play even on the same distro/desktop combination.
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dolphin_oracle
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Re: Does anyone really understand Linux fonts?

#2 Post by dolphin_oracle »

Guido wrote: ↑Tue Nov 20, 2018 10:56 am I've been looking for something/someone who can tell me how we get from font descriptions to what I assume are font bitmaps adjusted to resolution to what I presume is compositing. There are many libraries and utilities, but nowhere is there a good explanation as to the steps and what packages they go through. I'm really only concerned about XFCE at this point, but I suspect there may be multiple solutions in play even on the same distro/desktop combination.
there are a few different standards that govern fonts, but the one you might be most interested in is the freedesktop specification.

font-conf is a good place to start. https://www.freedesktop.org/software/fo ... -user.html
http://www.youtube.com/runwiththedolphin
lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 4 - MX-23
FYI: mx "test" repo is not the same thing as debian testing repo.
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Guido
Posts: 28
Joined: Sat Nov 10, 2018 4:21 pm

Re: Does anyone really understand Linux fonts?

#3 Post by Guido »

Sorry, it wasn't all that illuminating, except that fontconfig is really old. Is everyone still using this utility? It's hard to believe this hasn't been replaced.

I was looking for something more along the lines of whether there are multiple font rendering engines in current use in Linux. And frankly, how they accomplish their rendering. What components does gtk+ or XFCE use to render fonts? Things along these lines.

I use various programmers toolkits and generally don't worry about it. But it seems like font selection/rendering is popping up in a number of things I've looked at recently. All I can find are very general descriptions of how things work. It must be simple, but people are going out of their way to make it seem difficult. I was rather hoping for some article that lays things out properly. Right now, I'm not sure how many font rendering packages are being used on a typical linux system. Is it just freetype? Right now I'm looking through alternativesto.net to see what's in use. How can there not be an article somewhere on the web that covers all this? It's really not popping to the top of search engine results.
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