My usual manner of adding fonts has been to use the KDE font installer either as root or in administrator mode. This will put the fonts in /usr/local/share/fonts and will result in these fonts being available system-wide.

This does not work (for me) in Slackware 12. They install fine, but are not recognized by any program. I ran mkfontdir, mkfontscale, and fc-cache in the /usr/local/share/fonts directory with no effect. I checked the fontpath in xorg.conf and it looked correct. Rebooting and/or restarting X had no effect.

The only way I could get my fonts recognized by anything was to install them into my /home/steve/.fonts directory. I ran mkfontdir, mkfontscale, and fc-cache on this directory and I can now access my fonts.

Not a big deal for me as I am just one user, but is there a way to install new fonts that are available system wide or will we now need to install all new fonts in each users home directory?

Thanks.

That's weird, I just tried it and it installed fine to /usr/local/share/fonts. But I think I'm having the same problem as you, as they show up in that directory but I can't use them. Honestly, I kind of like it that way though although I can see how a Sysadmin may have problems adding new fonts.

It doesn't bother me either - now that I know a work-around. Given that the default desktop environment expects to be able to do something that is seemingly no longer possible, some might consider this a bug. At any rate, whether it's a bug or a feature, I'm sure I'm not the only one that installs fonts this way. At least it's out there so people know they aren't alone.

Thanks for sharing my confusion.

add an entry for /usr/local/share/fonts to your /etc/fonts/fonts.conf

I had tried that early on and it broke fc-cache with errors. That caused a bigger mess. Did this work for you? I also do not like to edit that file as it can really hose things if you don't know what you are doing.

My fix is much safer - still local fonts of course.

From my /etc/fonts/fonts.conf

Notice that I added

Well, that's good to know!

I had added my line to the top of the list - perhaps that's what caused the error?
Like I said, I don't like to mess with some things. I know just enough to get into trouble.

Thanks.

did you also add the line to your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file?

/etc/fonts/local.conf is the proper place to include those - fonts.conf will be overwritten on upgrades of the fontconfig package.
You'll notice that local.conf is sourced from /etc/fonts/conf.d/51-local.conf (which is a symlink to /etc/fonts/avail.conf/51-local.conf

What I notice is that /etc/fonts/local.conf does not exist. I can create one, but I thought this file was created by fontconfig. I haven't had to edit this file for some time so I don't remember what is supposed to be created.

I see that my slack 11 does not have this file either so I guess it is not normally generated. Taking a look at /etc/fonts/fonts.conf in slackware 11 shows that an entry for /usr/local/share/fonts was entered by the system at some point (not by me). So my question now is why do I need to create and edit an /etc/fonts/local.conf in slackware 12 for fonts in /usr/local/share/fonts to be recognised, but not in slackware 11?

as root i norm copy .ttf files to /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF and make sure the line pointing to that folder is in xorg.conf which it should already be