Fonts

Resources

Wikipedia

Project

Fonts are Article description::a core part of the system and are necessary in order to represent text on a display.

Font installation in Gentoo is handled much like other distributions. It can be as easy as copying the font file into the proper directory. Other methods, such as fontconfig are also possible.

Home directory

When installing fonts on a local basis, each user can create a .local/share/fonts directory in their home directory. This directory can then be filled with font files:

Check in a few applications to see if the newly copied font has been made available. A terminal emulator or an office program should work nicely for this purpose.

Globally available

System administrators (those with root privileges) can copy fonts into the system's /usr/share/fonts directory. This will make fonts available to any user on the system.

Console font

In order to use a specific font in the console, set the consolefont variable in /etc/conf.d/consolefont to the name of a file found in /usr/share/consolefonts/ (without the .psfu.gz suffix).

<syntaxhighlight lang="bash">consolefont="lat9w-16"</syntaxhighlight>

Next, verify that the consolefont service is in the boot runlevel:

If no runlevel is displayed for consolefont, then add it to the proper level:

If you need bigger fonts and more modern looking fonts for HD screens you should install media-fonts/terminus-font. It has fonts with sizes from 12 to 32 pixels.

GUI font

To configure fonts for use in graphical applications, see Fontconfig.

See also

• About Picking fonts in the Fontconfig docs
• Localization/Guide/The_Euro_symbol — how to display the Euro symbol (€) for the console and in X.
• Sakaki's Unofficial EFI Install Guide

External resources

• In-depth articles from Arch Linux wiki on:
  • Fonts in general
  • Fonts in Xorg - XLFD (and Xft)
• https://fontlibrary.org/ - A font distribution website that beautifully displays fonts.