Introduction to Fontconfig
The Fontconfig package contains
a library and support programs used for configuring and
customizing font access.
![[Note]](../images/note.png)
Note
Development versions of BLFS may not build or run
some packages properly if LFS or dependencies have been updated
since the most recent stable versions of the books.
Package Information
Fontconfig Dependencies
Required
FreeType-2.13.2
Optional
bubblewrap-0.8.0 (used by some tests),
cURL-8.4.0 and UnZip-6.0
(both used by some tests for downloading and extracting test files),
JSON-C-0.17,
DocBook-utils-0.6.14 and
libxml2-2.12.1,
texlive-20230313 (or install-tl-unx)
Note
An Internet connection is needed for some tests of
this package.
Note
If you have DocBook Utils installed and
you remove the --disable-docs parameter from
the configure command below, you must have
SGMLSpm-1.1 and texlive-20230313 installed
also, or the Fontconfig build will fail.
Installation of Fontconfig
Install Fontconfig by running the following
commands:
./configure --prefix=/usr \
--sysconfdir=/etc \
--localstatedir=/var \
--disable-docs \
--docdir=/usr/share/doc/fontconfig-2.14.2 &&
make
To test the results, issue: make check. One test
is known to fail if the kernel does not support user namespaces. Some
tests will download some font files via Internet.
Now, as the root user:
make install
If you did not remove the --disable-docs
parameter from the configure command, you can install
the pre-generated documentation by using the following commands as the
root user:
install -v -dm755 \
/usr/share/{man/man{1,3,5},doc/fontconfig-2.14.2/fontconfig-devel} &&
install -v -m644 fc-*/*.1 /usr/share/man/man1 &&
install -v -m644 doc/*.3 /usr/share/man/man3 &&
install -v -m644 doc/fonts-conf.5 /usr/share/man/man5 &&
install -v -m644 doc/fontconfig-devel/* \
/usr/share/doc/fontconfig-2.14.2/fontconfig-devel &&
install -v -m644 doc/*.{pdf,sgml,txt,html} \
/usr/share/doc/fontconfig-2.14.2Configuring Fontconfig
Config Files
/etc/fonts/*,
/etc/fonts/conf.d/* and
/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.avail/*
Configuration Information
The main configuration file for Fontconfig is
/etc/fonts/fonts.conf. Generally you do not want
to edit this file. It will also read /etc/fonts/local.conf
and any files in /etc/fonts/conf.d.
To put a new font directory in the configuration, create
(or update) the /etc/fonts/local.conf file with your
local information or add a new file in
/etc/fonts/conf.d. The default
location of fonts in Fontconfig is:
Fontconfig also ships many example
configuration files in the
/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.avail
directory. Symlinking specific files to
/etc/fonts/conf.d
will enable them. The default setup is generally good enough for
most users. See /etc/fonts/conf.d/README
for a description of the configuration files.
More information about configuring Fontconfig
can be found in the user's manual in file:///usr/share/doc/fontconfig-2.14.2/fontconfig-user.html.