*** IMPORTANT *** Recently, fontconfig changed to not include bitmapped fonts in the default font set. There is now a Debconf question about this. If you wish to enable bitmapped fonts manually, either reconfigure fontconfig-config (with dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config), or remove the /etc/fonts/conf.d/70-no-bitmaps.conf symbolic link and add a symlink named 70-yes-bitmaps.conf pointing to ../conf.avail/70-yes-bitmaps.conf: cd /etc/fonts/conf.d && \ rm -f 70-no-bitmaps.conf && \ ln -s ../conf.avail/70-yes-bitmaps.conf ***************** How fonts are handled in Debian: -------------------------------- Fontconfig is a library which handles font configuration and access at the system level. It is the foundation for a new font handling in X applications (but can also be useful without X). Applications not using fontconfig are accessing their fonts through the X server. Font packages for these applications are named xfonts-*. You can also use TrueType fonts with these applications if you install the x-ttcidfont-conf package, which connects the X server to defoma: fonts included in ttf-* packages or added manually using dfontmgr can then be used in these programs. A few of these applications, using Xft1, can benefit of antialiasing with vector fonts, but it is deprecated. The new font renderer in X is called freetype2, and applications using it access fonts on the client side. Most of them (including all GTK2/GNOME2 and KDE3 applications) do it using fontconfig, which provides listing and matching facilities for all fonts installed on the system. Any font installed in /usr/share/fonts or ~/.fonts will be accessible to these applications. This is now also true for fonts added using defoma. These programs can all benefit from antialiasing, autohinting and sub-pixel rendering. You can configure it through fontconfig, using debconf (dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config), or by changing links in /etc/fonts/conf.d by hand. Original text by: -- Josselin Mouette <joss@debian.org> Wed, 8 Oct 2003 21:51:35 +0200 Changes for fontconfig 2.3 packages by: -- Keith Packard <keithp@debian.org> Thu, 10 Mar 2005 13:29:11 -0800