Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 77705
(nearly) complete lack of documentation for font management
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:48:22 EDT
Not sure if this would go in the Customization Guide or the Reference Guide, but installation of new fonts is not at all well-documented. Currently, the RG contains roughly one paragraph which sorta describes installing fonts for xfs. It's so vague as to be useless, though. See docs/RH-DOCS/rhl-rg-en-8.0/s1-x-fonts.html for what it has currently. What's needed is a discussion of the two font subsystems (Xft, like used by GNOME 2; xfs, like used by GNOME 1.x apps) and how they're configured. Ideally, this would include examples of installing common font types (TrueType; Postscript with binary catalog files; Postscript with ascii catalog files; Postscript w/o any pregenerated catalog files). Now that Red Hat Linux is starting to be used as a desktop, it really needs more documentation of the things people have to do with their desktops (like install gobs of fonts)
There is an excellent explanation of the new fontconfig system by Mike Harris (his postings on a lot of things have been helpful) on the psyche list beginning here: https://listman.redhat.com/pipermail/psyche-list/2002-November/005503.html some of the comments should be lifted verbatim.. Moreover, there not only needs to be more documentation on installing system fonts, but some pointers to how different apps install and/or access fonts i.e. Open Office, Mozilla. Thanks
I just now carefully read Mike's superb description of Xft and Xft2. This is really high quality documentation that a user can read and understand and accept. I further propose that you have Mike do an extensive write up of this sort to be included as an addendum to the release notes of every future version of Red Hat.It is lucid writing like this, modified to add specific details about how to do common and not so common userland things, that will help advance Linux. --Bob Cochran
This information probably goes better in the RG and goes along with bug #74952.
This has been addressed in the latest version of the RG. Thank you for bringing this to my attention. Johnray