Hi,

In a fresh installed slack box (14.0 in my case), I see a lot of GUI application (such as KDE's Konsole) is using a font named 'Monospace'. Checked with fc-list, I did not find the name, so I think this is a font-config alias. Then I read my /etc/fonts/fonts.conf, but still not figure out the answer. Can anyone please tell me what's the tricky? Thanks.

It's in /etc/conf.d/60-latin.conf

Under recent versions of Slackware, "Monospace" "Serif" and "Sans" all point to the appropriate fonts from the DeJaVu font pack:

http://dejavu-fonts.org/wiki/Main_Page

I'd like to add that you can check your system's default monospace (AKA fixed) font with:

You can also adjust the command to report your "serif" or "sans-serif" font.

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That's fantastic! Thanks for showing me the command, really useful. Then, how about Chinese (or other none Latin) fonts? When I use an editor to open a file, if the file has some Chinese font in it, then these characters also get displayed. It's also similar when I open firefox to see some Englis and Chinese web pages. What I want to know it, how these Chinese characters get displayed? Obviously, they are not rendered with the same fonts as those English characters. How can I figure out the actual font names or even change it?

Thanks in advance.

Basically, a font is nothing but a collection of glyphs, so one font can gather glyphs used to represent latin and non-latin characters. This is where Unicode comes handy.

Did you mean, in a whole file if there is only one Chinese character, the the whole file in a GUI editor will be rendered with some kind of Chinese fonts but not the nice DejaVu family?

I don't know what happens in this specific case but generally speaking there is no chinese of latin font but chinese or latin characters visually displayed through a drawing, which is called a glyph.

Every font, being a collection of glyphs has specific characteristics, among which:

• the design style of the glyphs
• the list of included characters
• for each characters, the variants available (e.g. regular, bold, italic, and sizes)

In the specific case of DejaVu fonts, according to this page some non latin characters are available but no Chinese (ideographs) ones.

What I do not know is this: can a specific software use different fonts to display all characters of a text, in case it can't find one single font able to display all of them?

My guess (but this is only a guess) is that depends of the software(s) used to select the font(s) and make the rendering. Maybe someone more knowledgeable than me will give you a more accurate answer.

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