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directory. Only CID-keyed fonts require a slightly different procedure. For

this, see Section 12.2.1 on page 290.

12.2.1 Font Systems

XFree contains two completely different font systems: the old X11 core font

system and the newly designed Xft and fontconﬁg system. The following sec-

tions brieﬂy describe these two systems.

Xft

From the outset, the programmers of Xft made sure that scalable fonts in-

cluding antialiasing are supported well. If Xft is used, the fonts are ren-

dered by the application using the fonts, not by the X server as in the X11

core font system. In this way, the respective application has access to the

actual font ﬁles and full control of how the glyphs are rendered. This con-

stitutes the basis for the correct display of text in a number of languages.

Moreover, direct access to the font ﬁles is very useful for embedding fonts

for printing to make sure that the printout looks the same as the screen out-

put.

In SUSE LINUX, the two desktop environments KDE and GNOME,

Mozilla, and many other applications already use Xft by default. Xft is al-

ready used by more applications than the old X11 core font system.

Xft uses the fontconﬁg library for ﬁnding fonts and inﬂuencing how they

are rendered. The properties of fontconﬁg are controlled by the global con-

ﬁguration ﬁle /etc/fonts/fonts.conf and the user-speciﬁc conﬁgu-

ration ﬁle ~/.fonts.conf. Each of these fontconﬁg conﬁguration ﬁles

must begin with

<?xml version="1.0"?>

<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">

and end with

</fontconfig>

To add directories to search for fonts, append lines such as the following:

<dir>/usr/local/share/fonts/</dir>

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12.2. Installing and Conﬁguring Fonts