Linux Journal: Is Beauty Only Pixel Deep?, Part 2

“It is time once again to pull back the curtain from Linux fonts
and have a nice long chat with the gentleman at the controls.
Judging from some of the responses I received from my last column,
it seems that fonts are a nightmare to many (and I can’t say I
blame you). Nevertheless, it’s time to put away fear and learn to
enjoy your font experience.

“As many of you already know, I firmly believe in learning by
doing, by trying out things and seeing what happens when you type
this command or that one. On that note, I’m going to have you play
with your fonts. I’m going to have you try some things here, some
of which may wind up producing some strange-looking results when it
comes to your X display’s fonts. I’m not trying to scare you, I
simply want to make sure you back up your files before you
start.

“One of the questions that came up repeatedly was that of the
font server, specifically xfs. Why would you want to use xfs when
XFree86 4.X already knows how to deal with TrueType fonts? I agree
that it seems to be an overly complicated thing to do, but remember
Linux’s server roots (so to speak). The idea is that you can run a
font server on one machine in your office and have all the other
Linux clients take advantage of its resources. Why? Because each
machine then uses the same fonts, thus providing a consistent
environment. You might remember that xfs, the X font server, runs
on port 7100 by default…”

Complete
Story