shorne in japan

What are font fallbacks?

Fallbacks should be used if you do not want fontconfig fonts or you simply do not have fontconfig support. Currently enlightenment support 2 types of font searching and naming schemes. These are:

• Evas Native - This is similar to old xfs font directories, you can get a list of available font names using enlightenment_remote -font-available-list
• Fontconfig - This is the new way to do things, you can get a list of available names using: fc-list

In order to get font fallbacks working you will need to be using Evas Native fonts (Vera, Vera-Bold). Fontconfig fonts(Sans, Serif) do not need/support font fallbacks because they have fallbacks already built in.

Installing Evas Fonts

Creating an Evas Font Directory
In order for evas to be able to use fonts you will need to create a directory which contains the following files: fonts.alias, fonts.dir. You can look at the default font directory for an example. To create your own font directory you can do the following:

• 1. make a new directory, or just use: ~/.e/e/fonts
• 2. Move/Copy some fonts into your new directory

[shorne@asus fonts]$ ls
gbsn00lp.ttf  gkai00mp.ttf  kochi-gothic-subst.ttf  kochi-mincho-subst.ttf

• 3. Create the fonts.scale and fonts.dir files

$ mkfontscale
$ mkfontdir
[shorne@asus fonts]$ ls
fonts.dir    gbsn00lp.ttf  kochi-gothic-subst.ttf
fonts.scale  gkai00mp.ttf  kochi-mincho-subst.ttf

• 4. From the fonts.dir make the fonts.alias file. The fonts.alias file is almost a copy of the fonts.dir file with the ttf filenames changed to whatever alias you wish.

[shorne@asus fonts]$ cat fonts.alias
sungtil -arphic-ar pl sungtil gb-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso10646-1
kaitim -arphic-ar pl kaitim gb-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso10646-1
kochi-gothic gothic-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso10646-1
kochi-mincho mincho-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso10646-1

• 5. Now your directory is setup you should now make sure enlightenment can find it.

[shorne@asus fonts]$ enlightenment_remote -dirs-list fonts
REPLY <- BEGIN
REPLY Listing for "fonts"
REPLY: "/home/shorne/.e/e/fonts"
REPLY: "/home/shorne/local/share/enlightenment/data/fonts"
REPLY <- END
[shorne@asus fonts]$ enlightenment_remote -font-available-list
REPLY <- BEGIN
REPLY: "sungtil"
REPLY: "kaitim"
REPLY: "kochi-gothic"
REPLY: "kochi-mincho"
REPLY: "Vera-Bold-Italic"
REPLY: "Vera-Normal"
REPLY: "Vera-Bold"
REPLY: "Vera-Italic"
REPLY: "Vera-Mono-Bold-Italic"
REPLY: "Vera-Mono-Bold"
REPLY: "Vera-Mono-Italic"
REPLY: "Vera-Mono"
REPLY: "Vera-Serif"
REPLY: "Vera-Serif-Bold"
REPLY: "Vera"
REPLY <- END

The font dir should now be setup. The fonts available can now either be used as font fallbacks or as default fonts.

Using Fallbacks
Once enlightenment can find your fallback fonts simply add them to the fallback list in the order you want. Example:

• kochi-mincho
• sungtil

This means that after evas/englightenment finds that the default font does not contain a specific character glyph we will fallback to kochi-mincho and then sungtil.