Making aliases for broken fonts (Shallow Thoughts)

Making aliases for broken fonts

A web page I maintain (originally designed by someone else) specifies Times font. On all my Linux systems, Times displays impossibly tiny, at least two sizes smaller than any other font that's ostensibly the same size. So the page is hard to read. I'm forever tempted to get rid of that font specifier, but I have to assume that other people in the organization like the professional look of Times, and that this pathologic smallness of Times and Times New Roman is just a Linux font quirk.

In that case, a better solution is to alias it, so that pages that use Times will choose some larger, more readable font on my system. How to do that was in this excellent, clear post: How To Set Default Fonts and Font Aliases on Linux .

It turned out Times came from the gsfonts package, while Times New Roman came from msttcorefonts:

$ fc-match Times
n021003l.pfb: "Nimbus Roman No9 L" "Regular"
$ dpkg -S n021003l.pfb
gsfonts: /usr/share/fonts/type1/gsfonts/n021003l.pfb
$ fc-match "Times New Roman"
Times_New_Roman.ttf: "Times New Roman" "Normal"
$ dpkg -S Times_New_Roman.ttf
dpkg-query: no path found matching pattern *Times_New_Roman.ttf*
$ locate Times_New_Roman.ttf
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/Times_New_Roman.ttf

(dpkg -S doesn't find the file because msttcorefonts is a package that downloads a bunch of common fonts from Microsoft. Debian can't distribute the font files directly due to licensing restrictions.)

Removing gsfonts fonts isn't an option; aside from some documents and web pages possibly not working right (if they specify Times or Times New Roman and don't provide a fallback), removing gsfonts takes gnumeric and abiword with it, and I do occasionally use gnumeric. And I like having the msttcorefonts installed (hey, gotta have Comic Sans! :-) ). So aliasing the font is a better bet.

Following Chuan Ji's page, linked above, I edited ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf (I already had one, specifying fonts for the fantasy and cursive web families), and added these stanzas:

    <match>
        <test name="family"><string>Times New Roman</string></test>
        <edit name="family" mode="assign" binding="strong">
            <string>DejaVu Serif</string>
        </edit>
    </match>
    <match>
        <test name="family"><string>Times</string></test>
        <edit name="family" mode="assign" binding="strong">
            <string>DejaVu Serif</string>
        </edit>
    </match>

The page says to log out and back in, but I found that restarting firefox was enough. Now I could load up a page that specified Times or Times New Roman and the text is easily readable.

Tags: linux, fonts
[ 14:47 Jan 27, 2017    More linux | permalink to this entry | ]