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
    …

You can use `xset` to query the font path for your current X server.

    $ xset q
    …
    Font Path:
      /usr/share/fonts/misc/,/usr/share/fonts/100dpi/,/usr/share/fonts/75dpi/,built-ins
    …

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/