Re: How do fonts work when you have no font packages installed?

[Jon TURNEY <jon dot turney at dronecode dot org dot uk>]

On 04/07/2014 08:16, Michael DePaulo wrote:
> I just installed cygwin64 with only the base packages, "xorg-server",
> and its dependencies installed.
>
> The FAQ (2014-04-29) states:
> 3.5. My favourite font has gone! The font Emacs uses is just boxes
> Only minimal fonts will be installed after the upgrade.
>
> However, on my system, /usr/share/fonts/ is empty.

The X server has a version of 6x13 fixed font built-in, to allow it and 
(some) apps which use core fonts, to operate in this situation.

If some local X clients were installed, this would (hopefully) cause any 
X core fonts they require to be installed.

> Yet I am able to XDMCP into a GNOME2 CentOS 6.5 machine and all the
> fonts show up fine with the handful of apps I tested.
>
> Can someone explain how text is being rendered? Is Cygwin Xwin using
> fonts from the Windows OS?

While this is technically possible by adding the Windows font directory 
to the X server font path, that is not done.

(Although those fonts are made available to local clients by telling 
fontconfig to look in the Windows font directory, although this is not 
technically perfect as there isn't any mechanism to tell fontconfig to 
update it's cache when Windows fonts are added or removed)

> Are the fonts being rendered client-side via XRender?

Yes, if the apps you tested are modern, client-side fonts are almost 
certainly being used.  [1] explains this fairly well:

"The first X11 clients used the core X11 protocol to draw text, as that 
was the only choice. [...] Because GTK+ and Qt, the toolkits behind 
several applications including all GNOME and KDE applications, switched 
to Xft, many programs on most desktops [...] now use Xft."

Core fonts are a legacy feature.

If you want to use an older remote application which requires a 
particular core font, you will have to install it.

[1] http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Guide_to_X11/Fonts

--
Jon TURNEY
Volunteer Cygwin/X X Server maintainer

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