the corner office

This is one of those 'I fixed a problem but I'll be damned if I can do it again' posts. I wanted to get my favouritist monospaced font for Linux, Schumacher Clean. It's installed by default on Ubuntu, to a bunch of /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc/clR*.pcf.gz files. Linux and X and fonts is a world I've always remained gleefully ignorant of, probably to my own detriment a great many times. Perhaps reading another article or paragraph would lead me to enlightenment, but alternatively, it could just be that X11 font management is a confusing glob of software that hangs together by faith and a bit of wizardry by the 3 people on this planet who really grok it all. Who knows? Anyway, I have no idea what PCF fonts are exactly, but I gather they're basically just bitmap fonts, and Ubuntu, by default, seems to not list these bitmap fonts in the font dialog.

After a bit of digging around, it seems that running dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig does some magic stuff and enables bitmap fonts. I say 'it seems' because I did a few other obscure things along the way, and one or all of them might have played a wee part in the solution, too. Next time I lose my fonts, though, that's the one I'm trying first. I might even bring myself to read the man page.

Other commands which I'll read up on when I'm bored one day:

fc-cache -f -v
dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config

The Ubuntu FontInstallHowto wiki page is somewhat enlightening.