17. Font Control

Fonts installed on your system can be used by any graphical X Window System application. A remote font server is started automatically with your graphical environment, and then all fonts installed on your system are automatically available to all of your X Window System applications. X clients request character information from the font server, which can return data in various formats, ensuring high quality display of a variety of font styles and sizes.

You can use your familiar host-based X fonts via XConnectPro's XFontset Service. The XFontset Service utility provides:

• Rasterized fonts with outline data to all X applications
• Wide range of local X fonts (the standard font sets supplied by MIT along with X11 R6)
• Support for different locale 16-bits fonts including Chinese, Japanese, or Korean fonts, etc.
• Use of uncompressed PCF, SNF, and BDF format files as well as these fonts compressed with the 'compress' or 'gzip' utility
• Font Compiler to compile Microsoft Windows fonts into the X11 format
• Microsoft Windows fonts support in X-sessions.

This chapter describes how you can manage local and remote font sources for XServer to access and to resolve all font requests from X clients.

The Font Control tab of XSetup in the Settings dialog box lets you specify how XServer will use font sources that can be available in X-sessions (including scaled fonts).

The Pseudo fonts button in the tab allows you to define how XServer will use MS Windows fonts in X-sessions.

You can run Font Manager from the X-session Control menu (or run XFontset Service from the XConnectPro's Program Folder) to view:
- the ordered font sources list
- the font list of each font directory
- font information, font properties, font metrics
- images of any available font.

If the Trace Fonts Requests check box in the Trace tab of XSetup in the Settings dialog box is checked, then all font requests from X clients (with resolve messages) will be stored in the xserver.out file. This option is useful for analysis of the font accessibility and resolving font problems by XServer.