On Sat, 22 Dec 2001, Ian! D. Allen [NCFreeNet] wrote:
> The font beautification HOWTO went to great length to get us to
> put better-looking fonts in "front" of worse ones in the xfs config
> file; but, as best as I can tell, the order of the font paths in the
> /etc/X11/fs/config file is irrelevant to the order in which a font
> will be selected when I ask for one. All the fonts are simply sorted
> alphabetically, and when Netscape needs an "Arial" font, it gets the
> first one it finds (alphabetically).
>
> If I happen to install a font directory with fonts named
> "-aaaaa-stuff-stuff-stuff...", those fonts will take priority over all
> my other fonts, even if I put the font directory last in my xfs config
> file. Renaming the fonts to begin with "-zzzzzz-stuff-stuff-stuff..." (in
> the fonts.dir file) means that these fonts are now chosen last, even
> if I put this font directory first in my xfs config file.
>
> Is this the way it is supposed to work?
In fact, that is Netscape's behaviour, not X11's. Netscape gets a
complete list of fonts for a given charset (e.g. "Western (iso-8859-1)"),
and sorts it alphabetically. You can see this list in the
Edit|Preferences|Appearance|Fonts. And than Netscape does its own
matching on that list, in which case "-aaa-FACENAME-..." always gets
precedence over "-bbb-FACENAME-...".
Yes, that's really a problem -- if you happen to have both Netscpe
and AbiWord installed, Netscape always uses "-AbiSource-Arial-..." for
<FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">, and Arial is awful at small sizes.
To check that X11 does obey font path order, try using
"xfd -fn '-*-FACENAME-*'" -- it will show you the font which is earlier in
font path, not in the alphabet. And it is true for both xfs config and
XFree86's FontPath.
_________________________________________
Dmitry Yu. Bolkhovityanov
The Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics
Novosibirsk, Russia
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