Recently, fonts have turned really ugly in various applications. In an attempt to fix them, I was trying to add fontpaths with xset. However, if I try to load msttcorefonts, for example, xset chokes.

xset: bad font path element (#100), possible causes are:
Directory does not exist or has wrong permissions
Directory missing fonts.dir
Incorrect font server address or syntax

The directory has the same perms as other directories that I'm able to add to the fontpath without an error. I've run mkfontdir and mkfontscale in all of the directories, so that shouldn't be a problem, and I'm not sure about the third one.

I'm testing the fonts in Gnome right now and everything looks great. The problem is confined to xfce.

The output for Xorg.0.log is:
Could not init font path element unix/:7100, removing from list!
Could not init font path element /usr/share/fonts/truetype/freefont, removing from list!
Could not init font path element /usr/share/fonts/X11/TTF/, removing from list!
Could not init font path element /usr/share/fonts/X11/OTF, removing from list!
Could not init font path element /usr/share/fonts/X11/CID/, removing from list!

There isn't even /usr/share/fonts/X11/* in the list and I don't know why it removes the local font server from the list.


Thanks

I restarted my system and the font path is now correct. I'm also able to add the desired directories to the fontpath. However, now the fonts are too small, system-wide. My terminal was using Monospace-11 font before the reboot, which has stayed the same, but now it's really small. Also, the window title areas have really small fonts. There might be a way to change system-wide settings with Gnome or KDE but there doesn't seem to be a way with XFCE. Emacs appears to be back to its normal self ("font" used to be squares) but one app in particular still has serious font size issues. The fonts in the main window are unreadable whereas all other windows are uneffected, with a few exceptions.