Fontconfig (the name is spelled in both capitalized and uncapitalized form) is a library designed to provide system-wide font configuration, customization, and application access. Fontconfig is written and maintained by Keith Packard. Software development is the translation of a user need or marketing goal into a software product. ... Keith Packard is a software developer, best known for his work on the X Window System. ... A software release refers to the creation and availability of a new version of a computer software product. ... A software release refers to the creation and availability of a new version of a computer software product. ... An operating system (OS) is a set of computer programs that manage the hardware and software resources of a computer. ... Diagram of the relationships between several Unix-like systems A Unix-like operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, while not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. ... A website (or Web site) is a collection of web pages, images, videos and other digital assets and hosted on a particular domain or subdomain on the World Wide Web. ... Julio Pérez Ferrero Library - Cúcuta, Colombia A modern-style library in Chambéry A library is a collection of information resources and services, organized for use, and maintained by a public body, institution, or private individual. ... A font can mean: A member of a typeface family; or digital font - file format that encapsulates a typeface family in a database. ... Keith Packard is a software developer, best known for his work on the X Window System. ...

Applications can use fontconfig in two ways:

1. by querying it for the available fonts on the system or
2. by asking it for a font matching certain parameters (pattern). Fontconfig will then return a font whose properties match those specified in the pattern as closely as possible.

To perform font matching, fontconfig stores a lot of typesetting information about all of the installed fonts, such as the name of the font family, style, weight, DPI, Unicode coverage etc. This information is also used to perform font substitution. In typography, a typeface is a co-ordinated set of character designs, which usually comprises an alphabet of letters, a set of numerals and a set of punctuation marks. ... Dots per inch (DPI) is a measure of printing resolution, in particular the number of individual dots of ink a printer or toner can produce within a linear one-inch space. ... Unicode is an industry standard designed to allow text and symbols from all of the writing systems of the world to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers. ... Font substitution is the process of using one font in place of another when the intended font either is not available or does not contain glyphs for the required characters. ...

Files

Fontconfig uses XML format for its configuration files. The DTD for fontconfig files is normally located at /etc/fonts/fonts.dtd. The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a W3C-recommended general-purpose markup language that supports a wide variety of applications. ... Document Type Definition (DTD), defined slightly differently within the XML and SGML specifications, is one of several SGML and XML schema languages, and is also the term used to describe a document or portion thereof that is authored in the DTD language. ...

Master configuration file is usually /etc/fonts/fonts.conf; it references a few other configuration locations which may or may not exist:

• /etc/fonts/local.conf
• /etc/fonts/conf.d directory
• ~/.font.conf

A simple example of a configuration file:

 <?xml version="1.0"?> <!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd"> <fontconfig> <!-- Enable antialiasing for all fonts --> <match target="font"> <edit mode="assign" name="antialias"><bool>true</bool></edit> </match> </fontconfig> 

See the fontconfig manual for details. Font rasterization is the process of converting text from a vector description (as found in scalable fonts such as TrueType fonts) to a raster or bitmap description. ...

Utilities

fontconfig ships with two command line utilities to manage the font configuration:

• fc-list: Lists all fonts fontconfig knows about or all fonts matching a pattern.
• fc-cache: Creates a cache of all FreeType readable fonts in a specified directory or create a cache of all FreeType readable fonts from all directories specified in Configuration files.

Look up cache in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... FreeType is a software library that implements a font engine. ...

Limitations

fc-cache is currently unable to handle the styles in many common fonts, such as Eurostile Regular, Helvetica Narrow, and Frutiger Black, and defaults to making such styles appear as other version (Expanded in the case of Eurostile, and Regular in most other cases) of the same font. The change in 2006 to a binary file format effectively made correcting this flaw impossible for normal users; as such the font system on Linux is severly handicapped as regards professional design work. Eurostile (sometimes misspelled as Eurostyle) is a variation of Microgramma, a sans serif typeface designed by Aldo Novarese and Alessandro Butti in 1952. ... The various hand-drawn weights of the Helvetica family can have distinctly different shapes. ... Frutiger, named after its Swiss designer Adrian Frutiger (born 1928), is a typeface, belonging to the sans-serif family. ... Linux (IPA pronunciation: ) is a Unix-like computer operating system family. ...

Fontconfig depends on FreeType, a font renderer, and expat, an XML parser library, both are free software. FreeType is a software library that implements a font engine. ... Expat is a stream-oriented XML 1. ... This article is about free software as defined by the sociopolitical free software movement; for information on software distributed without charge, see freeware. ...

Versioning scheme

The current stable version of fontconfig is 2.4.2: fontconfig uses a versioning scheme in which values of 90 or above in the last number indicate prerelease versions.

External links

• Fontconfig manual
• fontconfig.org wiki
• Fontconfig releases
• Font Configuration and Customization for Open Source Systems (PDF)