From: W. Trevor King <wking@drexel.edu>
Date: Thu, 9 Feb 2012 06:27:18 +0000 (-0500)
Subject: Add fonts post.
X-Git-Url: http://git.tremily.us/?a=commitdiff_plain;h=a80b9f34187d14639f779abc6c828211d7aeae45;p=blog.git

Add fonts post.
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+Here are some quick notes on working with fonts on Linux.
+
+X Windows fonts
+===============
+
+Fonts are managed by [fontconfig][].  For per-user fonts, you can
+generally just drop your font into `~/.fonts/`, and it will be picked
+up by X.  You can use `fc-list` to list fonts that X can find.
+
+    $ fc-list
+    Verdana:style=Regular,Normal,obyčejné,Standard,Κανονικά,…
+    ClassicHeavy:style=Light
+    Nimbus Sans L:style=Regular Italic
+    Shalom:style=Stick
+    …
+
+I use [gucharmap][] to browse fonts and select unicode characters that
+I haven't yet bound to the keyboard via [[Xmodmap]] or
+[[XCompose|Compose_key]].  There are a number of nice fonts over at
+the [Open Font Library][OFL].
+
+Web fonts
+=========
+
+Modern desktop fonts are generally [TrueType][] or [OpenType][].  For
+the web, where bandwidth is important, there is the [Web Open Font
+Format][WOFF] (WOFF), which compresses the desktop formats.  I've
+written a simple script ([[font-reduce]]) that uses FontForge to
+convert subsets of fonts to WOFF for use on the web.
+
+Console fonts
+=============
+
+    $ setfont /usr/share/consolefonts/gr737b-9x16-medieval.psfu.gz
+
+On [[Gentoo]] you can set the default in `/etc/conf.d/consolefont`.
+
+Authoring fonts
+===============
+
+The main open source tool seems to be [FontForge][].
+		
+Further reading
+===============
+
+There are more details about [fonts on Linux][arch] on the Arch wiki
+page.  Kevin Bowling also has some interesting notes about
+[configuring fontconfig][KB].  Finally, Nice Web Type has notes about
+[using fonts on the web][NWT].
+
+
+[fontconfig]: http://fontconfig.org/
+[gucharmap]: http://live.gnome.org/Gucharmap
+[OFL]: http://openfontlibrary.org/
+[TrueType]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueType
+[OpenType]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenType
+[WOFF]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Open_Font_Format
+[FontForge]: http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/
+[arch]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fonts
+[KB]: http://www.kev009.com/wp/2009/12/getting-beautiful-fonts-in-gentoo-linux/
+[NWT]: http://nicewebtype.com/notes/2009/10/30/how-to-use-css-font-face/