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

[Richard Cobbe]

On Wed, May 29, 2019 at 12:35:06AM -0400, Richard L. Hamilton wrote:
> Have you tried creating ~/.fonts directory and putting the font(s) in
> there? Looking at both /opt/local/etc/fonts/fonts.conf and
> /opt/X11/lib/X11/fontconfig/fonts.conf, I see it listed as one of the
> directories (although as one that will likely go away in the future, with
> what per-user alternative, I don't know).

Well, I suppose I could symlink the fonts into there; I'd like the font to
be accessible to native MacOS programs like TextEdit and Pages as well.

That said, /opt/local/etc/fonts/fonts.conf does have a comment that says
~/.fonts is a deprecated location, and I'd prefer not to have this break
suddenly on me when I install a fontconfig update in 8 months, because I
will undoubtedly have forgotten about this stuff in the interim.

Interestingly, it appears that there's some daemon that's watching
~/Library/Fonts, because when I copied the .ttf files into that location,
fonts.list and fonts.scale just automagically appeared.  I did have to run
mkfontdir by hand to generate fonts.dir, though.

In any case, I figured out how to set the relevant environment variables at
the right time on login, although it's a bit krufty, so I think I'm set.

Thanks a bunch for your help!

Richard