User:Xtian

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Editing Fonts wiki page brings up style question

    "Also you may need to update your Xorg configuration files 
    (e.g. /etc/X11/xorg.conf or /etc/xorg.conf) with the new 
    directory. Search for FontPath to find the correct location 
    within the files to add your new path. See #Fonts with X.Org 
    for more detail." [1]

In this paragraph, the user is directed to edit their xorg.conf file with the actual font path. Reading about fonts and X11 the reader is following instructions in the context of a complex system--Xorg--of files and directories. Xorg manages many other resources and loads conf directives from different files. In other words we're not talking about, say, a user's application with resource files just in the user's home director under a dot directory.

Setting up Xorg is a complex topic. The action word "search" has an ambiguous meaning which could refer to searching for files or directories such as "fonts.dir" (an index file used by X.org to find font files). Ambiguous references in a complex topic is not ideal instruction. The meaning is easy enough to intuit: upon opening the xorg.conf file do a text document search for "FontPath"; however, this is not common documentation reference. Here is an example from X.org's Fonts documentation.

    "It is computed by appending all the directories mentioned 
    in the “FontPath” entries of the “Files” section in the order 
    in which they appear." [2]

While its useful to give quick advice to readers such as find the FontPath, and by the way the easiest way to do this is a text search--don't you know--its somewhat misleading. This is never more the case than when referencing some line about some app which needs to find some needle in the haystack. There's always one more thing, one more file, one more way to do something. Its bad enough that every Arch wiki page on an app like X11 must assume "your own installation may be different".

References

FAQ: "I keep getting the error message: could not open default font 'fixed'" Xorg recommends loading fonts manually.

Configuring the core X11 fonts system See: Setting the server's font path.

Xorg Man Page, Files Section Location of the FontPath entry.

Mkfontdir command Disambiguation on the term fonts.dir


[1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Font#Manual_installation [2]: http://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.7/doc/xorg-docs/fonts/fonts.html Xtian (talk) 23:15, 26 September 2013 (UTC)