"Putrycz, Erik"
I have to say one nice change would be to change the default "Sans" font to something nicer... "FreeSans" renders way better with the font smoothing. The "sans" font is functional but IMO a little ugly...
"Sans" is just an alias which expands to the first font in the
"sans-serif" prefer list in /etc/fonts/suse-post-user.conf which is
installed *and* supports the language of your current locale.
I quote this list here:
<alias>
<family>sans-serif</family>
<prefer>
<family>Arial</family>
<family>Albany AMT</family>
<family>Verdana</family>
<family>DejaVu Sans</family>
<family>Liberation Sans</family>
<family>SUSE Sans</family>
<family>Bitstream Vera Sans</family>
<family>Nimbus Sans L</family>
<family>Luxi Sans</family>
<family>Mukti Narrow</family>
<family>Nachlieli CLM</family>
<family>Helvetica</family>
<family>Khmer OS System</family>
<family>Lohit Punjabi</family>
<family>Pothana2000</family>
<family>TSCu_Paranar</family>
<family>BPG Glaho</family>
<family>Terafik</family>
<family>FreeSans</family>
<family>Meiryo</family>
<family>MS PGothic</family>
<family>MS Gothic</family>
<family>HGPGothicB</family>
<family>HGGothicB</family>
<family>IPAPGothic</family>
<family>IPAGothic</family>
<family>Sazanami Gothic</family>
<family>Kochi Gothic</family>
<family>CMEXSong</family>
<family>FZSongTi</family>
<family>AR PL ShanHeiSun Uni</family>
<family>FZMingTiB</family>
<family>AR PL SungtiL GB</family>
<family>AR PL Mingti2L Big5</family>
<family>UnDotum</family>
<family>Baekmuk Gulim</family>
<family>Baekmuk Dotum</family>
</prefer>
</alias>
I.e. "sans" might expand to "DejaVu Sans" if your locale is en_US.UTF-8
and you have neither the agfa-fonts nor the Microsoft webfonts installed.
If your locale is ja_JP.UTF-8 however, it will expand by default to
IPAPGothic because this is usually the first font in the list which
supports Japanese and is installed by default when Japanese support is
selected during the installation.
To get reasonable defaults for all languages, one should not use
specific font names as the default in the Gnome/KDE/... whatever setup
but stay with these aliases.
To change the defaults, the above preference list should be tweaked.
If you prefer the fonts from the freefont package, you can make
these the default for the "serif", "sans-serif", and "monospace"
aliases by adding the following rules to your ~/.fonts.conf file:
<alias>
<family>serif</family>
<prefer>
<family>FreeSerif</family>
</prefer>
</alias>
<alias>
<family>sans-serif</family>
<prefer>
<family>FreeSans</family>
</prefer>
</alias>
<alias>
<family>monospace</family>
<prefer>
<family>FreeMono</family>
</prefer>
</alias>
The ~/.fonts.conf is read *before* /etc/fonts/suse-post-user.conf.
For the "prefer" lists this has the effect the the prefer lists
from ~/.fonts.conf are added to the *top* of the prefer lists from
/etc/fonts/suse-post-user.conf, i.e. the user specified fonts
are preferred.
To check what a specific alias expands to for a certain language,
use fc-match:
mfabian@magellan:~$ locale
LANG=ja_JP.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="ja_JP.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="ja_JP.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="ja_JP.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="ja_JP.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="ja_JP.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="ja_JP.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="ja_JP.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="ja_JP.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="ja_JP.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="ja_JP.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="ja_JP.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="ja_JP.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=
mfabian@magellan:~$ fc-match sans
ipagp.ttf: "IPAPGothic" "Regular"
mfabian@magellan:~$ LANG=km_KH.UTF-8 fc-match sans
KhmerOS_sys.ttf: "Khmer OS System" "Regular"
mfabian@magellan:~$ LANG=en_GB.UTF-8 fc-match sans
arial.ttf: "Arial" "Normal"
mfabian@magellan:~$
By the way, I think the "DejaVu" fonts render much better then the
"freefont" fonts, the "DejaVu" font project is also a lot more active in
further developing the fonts.
--
Mike FABIAN