Locations of Font and Font Metric Files

Locations of Font and Font Metric Files

By default, font and font metrid files are installed in the directories listed in Table 5-1.

Font and Font Metric Directories
Directory Path Conventional Contents
/usr/lib/DPS/outline/base Outline font files in the Adobe Type 1 format
/usr/lib/X11/fonts/Type1 Symbolic links to font files in /usr/lib/DPS/outline/base
/usr/lib/DPS/AFM Adobe Font Metric (AFM) files
/usr/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi Bitmap fonts designed for the screen resolution of 100 dpi
/usr/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi Bitmap fonts designed for the screen resolution of 75 dpi
/usr/lib/X11/fonts/misc Miscellaneous other bitmap fonts
/usr/lib/X11/fonts/Speedo Outline font files in the Bitstream Speedo(TM) format
/usr/lib/X11/fonts/CID AFM, CCM, CFM, CIDFont and CMap files for large outline fonts in the Adobe CID-keyed format

Font and Font Metric Directories
Directory Path	Conventional Contents
/usr/lib/DPS/outline/base	Outline font files in the Adobe Type 1 format
/usr/lib/X11/fonts/Type1	Symbolic links to font files in /usr/lib/DPS/outline/base
/usr/lib/DPS/AFM	Adobe Font Metric (AFM) files
/usr/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi	Bitmap fonts designed for the screen resolution of 100 dpi
/usr/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi	Bitmap fonts designed for the screen resolution of 75 dpi
/usr/lib/X11/fonts/misc	Miscellaneous other bitmap fonts
/usr/lib/X11/fonts/Speedo	Outline font files in the Bitstream Speedo(TM) format
/usr/lib/X11/fonts/CID	AFM, CCM, CFM, CIDFont and CMap files for large outline fonts in the Adobe CID-keyed format

The X Window System, Display PostScript, IRIS GL Font Manager, Impressario, and other software components use the directories listed in Table 5-1 by default. The locations of font files are made known to the X Window System in two ways:

Within each directory specified in the X font path, a file named fonts.dir contains a directory of filenames with their corresponding 14-part font names. For example, to see the font names available in /usr/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi, use the command
more /usr/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi/fonts.dir
This file is created by mkfontdir (see the mkfontdir(1) reference page).
The files /usr/lib/X11/fonts/ps2xlfd_map* are used by the X Window System and the IRIS Font Manager to map PostScript names or short font names to 14-part X font names, and vice versa. The IRIS Font Manager does not use any bitmap fonts that do not have an entry in those files.

Conventions for Bitmap Font File Names

The names of bitmap font files are specified according to the following conventions:

Filenames begin with three or four letters unique to the font family, such as cour for the Courier family, or 8x13 for a utility bitmap family.
When a family has different style variants such as Roman and Italic, the next character of the filename is an uppercase letter to indicate the style, for example courO for Courier Oblique, or 8x13B for a utility bold font.
The last two characters of the filename are two digits giving the nominal size of the font in points, as in courO18.
Most bitmap files are of the Portable Compiled Format (PCF) type and have the file suffix .pcf, as in courO18.pcf or 8x13B.pcf.
Files are compressed using the compress command (see the compress(1) reference page), and, therefore, have the terminal suffix .Z as in courO18.pcf.Z.

In /usr/lib/DPS/AFM there is one font metric file per typeface. When you install a font module, such as the Japanese Font Module, metric files for CID-keyed fonts are stored in the directory /usr/lib/X11/fonts/CID/character-collection/AFM. Font metric files are primarily used by text-processing and desktop-publishing programs to, for example, generate PostScript code for a specified document.

Creating Font Aliases

If you do not want to use long X font names, you can specify shorter aliases for those names. Silicon Graphics uses a file called fonts.alias to specify short aliases for fonts. There can be a fonts.alias file in an X font directory. For example, see the file fonts.alias in the directory /usr/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi.

A typical font alias looks like this:

fixed -misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1

This associates the short alias "fixed" to the longer name that follows it. The alias file can also be used to specify alternate conventions for the component parts of a 14-part font name. For example, the following entry creates an alias that uses "regular" instead of "medium" for the weight component:

-adobe-utopia-regular-i-normal--14-100-100-100-p-74-iso8859-1
-adobe-utopia-medium-i-normal--14-100-100-100-p-74-iso8859-1

To specify your own font aliases in a font directory, store them in a file called fonts.alias.local in that directory. That way your entries do not disappear when you upgrade your system software.