Debian Flame

This comment posted to a Slashdot article discussion on the bombshell RedHat dropped on the community today reminded me of one of my gripes about the current state of Debian. So without further fanfare and gratuitous linking, here’s my latest vintage of whine. Cheese is to follow in another, later, post.

The state of fonts support in Debian’s various X related packages is deplorable to say the least. At a basic and fundamental level, the X debconf managed XF86Config-4 file contains 8 or 9 lines specifying paths of local fonts, and then depending on as-yet-unknown factors, it may or may not contain an additional line that specifies the server and port on which a font server is running from which to request additional fonts. So far so good, but only because that’s the very basic level of configuration for fonts in X.

So which font server to pick? The x-window-system task package depends on xfs, but that’s not the only available font server. There’s also xfs-xtt and xfstt … no conflicts or replaces entries in their package descriptions to describe just exactly how it is they are supposed to work: in conjunction with xfs or instead of, and truetype fonts sound oh so juicy.

Next up, installing fonts. Sure, you could just rely on the base X fonts, but what about using some fonts that are actually aesthetically pleasing, like msttcorefonts? Try to install that, and as expected the package begins wgetting the fonts from the sourceforge download server and extracting them using cabextract … but it also asks to install a mysterious package called defoma, which after investigation turns out to stand for DEbian FOnts MAnager. Great. What exactly does this package do? Apparently it manages fonts. What does this package really do? No idea. It certainly doesn’t add any more entries to XF86Config-4, which is where we’d normally expect new font directory entries to show up.

Ok, so truetype fonts no longer satisfy, now we must have anti-aliasing. Yeah, anti-aliasing, you know, like Microsoft’s ClearType. Only apparently, if you enable AA fonts in window managers such as wmaker, or fluxbox, or any other -box, the letters become these big blocky monstrosities that may just be anti-aliased, but they’re also ugly as sin. Yeah, you know what I’m talking about, I’m sure.

What do do if you want pretty fonts? You have, essentially, two options: gnome, and KDE. KDE hasn’t been able to properly install in unstable for months, which is a whine for another time (maybe next time), but we’ll get to that. Soon.

Installing KDE pulls in yet another font management package - fontconfig. It introduces yet another complexity into the world of fonts in Debian: fonts.conf, which includes a local.conf for global font settings, and user-specific .fonts.conf files. These are supposed to organize all the fonts on the system according to lists of specifications which applications may search for when deciding which fonts to use. But it doesn’t usually work that way. konsole, for example, for ages had a problem where the “normal” font wasn’t exactly … normal. Which is unfortunate, because at first glance fontconfig looked like a step towards the sanity represented by the by far easier-to-use Windows font configuration.