Difference in rendering xft fonts in xorg-server and XQuartz.app

[Richard Cobbe]

On Tue, May 28, 2019 at 09:19:12AM -0700, Richard Cobbe wrote:
> On Tue, May 28, 2019 at 09:53:54AM -0400, Richard L. Hamilton wrote:
>
> > > I don't know where X11 or its terminal stores its font settings...
> > >
> >
> > Native macOS font locations:
> > ~/Library/Fonts/
> > /Library/Fonts/
> > /Network/Library/Fonts/
> > /System/Library/Fonts
>
> The desired font is a truetype, stored in ~/Library/Fonts/Microsoft, which
> I created myself, and this could easily be the problem.  There is a
> fonts.dir in that directory, but the directory is naturally not listed as
> part of the font path when I run `xset q`.  (Interestingly, neither is
> ~/Library/Fonts, although /Library/Fonts and /System/Library/Fonts are both
> present.)
>
> I'm fairly sure that rxvt uses fontconfig, so I checked out
> /opt/local/etc/fonts, and there too I see /Library/Fonts,
> /Network/Library/Fonts, and /System/Library/Fonts, but not
> ~/Library/Fonts, and certainly not ~/Library/Fonts/Microsoft.

This was it.  Copying the font files to /Library/Fonts solved the problem
nicely, and for this particular client app, it's definitely fontconfig's
path settings, not the X server's.

For a variety of reasons, I'd prefer to keep the font files in
~/Library/Fonts rather than copying them to /Library, and I'd also rather
not put /Users/cobbe/Library/Fonts into a system configuration file.  (It'd
probably be OK in practice, since I'm the only person to use this computer,
but it still feels really sloppy.)

I looked at the fonts-conf manpage, and although it suggests that it reads
~/.fonts.conf, this doesn't appear to actually be the case.  It does,
however, read $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/fontconfig/fonts.conf, and creating that
file with the appropriate <dir> entry works fine.

Now I just have to figure out how to automatically set XDG_CONFIG_HOME
before I start X, since I want to start X and urxvt automatically on
login.  That's a separate thread, I think.

Richard