Set font as default linux

Font Woes

It’s fairly straightforward to set the default font used in native apps on a modern Linux desktop, or the default fonts used to render web pages in your browser of choice.

But if you’re reading this, you probably know that that’s far from the end of the story. You might have noticed that Firefox and Chrome rudely ignore your font settings for many websites. This is because many (if not most) popular sites, including Google, Yahoo, Facebook or GitHub, specify preferred fonts for text:

• Google: arial, sans-serif
• Yahoo: Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial
• Facebook: lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif
• GitHub: Helvetica, arial, freesans, clean, sans-serif

You might immediately notice that the most commonly used fonts on these sites, Arial and Helvetica, are fonts that come bundled with Microsoft Windows, and are most likely not installed on your Linux system. In this case, what font is actually used is anyone’s guess. If they are installed (e.g., via a package like ttf-ms-fonts or directly copied from a Windows machine), well, you still probably want to display your favorite font instead 🙂

So, let’s find out what your default fonts and aliases are with fc-match :

for family in serif sans-serif monospace Arial Helvetica Verdana "Times New Roman" "Courier New"; do echo -n "$family: " fc-match "$family" done 

This is what I get on my machine by default:

serif: DejaVuSerif.ttf: "DejaVu Serif" "Book" sans-serif: DejaVuSans.ttf: "DejaVu Sans" "Book" monospace: DejaVuSansMono.ttf: "DejaVu Sans Mono" "Book" Arial: DejaVuSans.ttf: "DejaVu Sans" "Book" Helvetica: n019003l.pfb: "Nimbus Sans L" "Regular" Verdana: DejaVuSans.ttf: "DejaVu Sans" "Book" Times New Roman: DejaVuSerif.ttf: "DejaVu Serif" "Book" Courier New: DejaVuSansMono.ttf: "DejaVu Sans Mono" "Book" 

Font Configuration Files

So, assuming you’ve installed your fonts of choice (via a package, copying to /usr/share/fonts or ~/.fonts — please verify with the fc-list command), how do you set them as default in all apps and web sites?

Well, there are two places where fonts are configured: system-wide configuration resides in /etc/fonts/ , and per-user configs are stored in ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf (note that this used to be ~/.fonts.conf before fontconfig 2.10.1). For simplicity’s sake, we’ll do it in ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf .

Let’s open up ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf , or create it if it doesn’t already exist. Put the following skeleton structure in there:

We will put all of our custom configuration between and .

Setting Default Fonts

First, let’s set the default serif, sans serif, and monospace fonts. I’ll use the beautiful Chrome OS fonts as an example ( ttf-croscore if you’re running Arch Linux). Insert the following between and :

   serif Tinos  sans-serif Arimo  sans Arimo  monospace Cousine  

Aliasing Microsoft Fonts

Now, we will create aliases for commonly used fonts like Arial and Helvetica, so that our favorite fonts will always be used instead of these fonts, e.g. when requested by a web site.

Insert the following between and , after the previous snippet:

   Arial Arimo   Helvetica Arimo   Verdana Arimo   Tahoma Arimo    Comic Sans MS Arimo   Times New Roman Tinos   Times Tinos   Courier New Cousine   

Note that the Microsoft fonts are aliased directly to the our preferred substitute fonts. Aliasing to generic families (serif, sans-serif etc.) may or may not work depending on your configuration in /etc/fonts (they didn’t work for me), so it’s safer this way.

This list is of course by no means definitive; add/remove aliases as you like.

The Result

You’ll need to log out and back in for all applications to update. You should see the difference immediately:

Google search results, before (Arial):

Google search results, after (Arimo):

You can verify that the aliases have been set up correctly with fc-match :

for family in serif sans-serif monospace Arial Helvetica Verdana "Times New Roman" "Courier New"; do echo -n "$family: " fc-match "$family" done 

which should now give you something like:

serif: Tinos-Regular.ttf: "Tinos" "Regular" sans-serif: Arimo-Regular.ttf: "Arimo" "Regular" monospace: Cousine-Regular.ttf: "Cousine" "Regular" Arial: Arimo-Regular.ttf: "Arimo" "Regular" Helvetica: Arimo-Regular.ttf: "Arimo" "Regular" Verdana: Arimo-Regular.ttf: "Arimo" "Regular" Times New Roman: Tinos-Regular.ttf: "Tinos" "Regular" Courier New: Cousine-Regular.ttf: "Cousine" "Regular" 

Other Notes

Some existing examples you may find online show the following syntax:

This will produce an error message like

Fontconfig error: "/home/username/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf", line 38: invalid attribute 'name' 

The fix is to change to just , as shown above.

Источник

Font configuration/Examples

Configurations can vary to a degree. Please post Fontconfig configurations with an explanation for why they were done.

Hinted fonts

~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf

     true  false  true  hintslight  lcddefault  rgb    

No hinting for italic or bold

     true  false  lcddefault  hintslight  true  rgb    15  lcdlight  hintnone    medium  hintnone  lcdlight    0  hintnone  lcdlight    

Enable anti-aliasing only for bigger fonts

Some users prefer the sharper rendering that anti-aliasing does not offer:

     false    12  true    16  true    

Disable bold font

For when a font does not present itself well in bold and you cannot disable bold fonts in the application (st for example).

.  Envy Code R  medium  medium   .

Disable ligatures for monospaced fonts

This prevents letter combinations like «ffi» from being squashed into a single-width character in some monospaced fonts. The whole block needs to be duplicated to include extra fonts.

   Disable ligatures for monospaced fonts to avoid ff, fi, ffi, etc. becoming only one character wide  Nimbus Mono PS  liga off dlig off    

Some other fonts may also require disabling features such as calt and/or clig .

You can test the effectiveness of this with the following command:

$ echo -e "| worksheet |\n| buffering |\n| difficult |\n| finishing |\n| different |\n| efficient |" | pango-view --font="Nimbus Mono PS" /dev/stdin

Some programs (such as Firefox) do not support the fontfeatures tag, so for those replacing the font with another is the only option. See Font configuration#Set default or fallback fonts for details.

Note: Starting with Firefox version 114, fontconfig settings such as fontfeatures will be supported.

Default fonts

For font consistency, all applications should be set to use the serif, sans-serif, and monospace aliases, which are mapped to particular fonts by fontconfig. See Metric-compatible fonts for options and examples.

Arabic

Example fonts.conf which specifies a default font for the Arabic language and keeps western style fonts for Latin letters. You will require either ttf-arabeyes-fonts AUR or noto-fonts for the below to work. You can also choose to install any other Arabic fonts and accordingly change the font name below based on your preference

The above should work for most applications but some applications like Chromium do not work with the language match test. If you find some applications not using your selected fonts, you can use the below alias and prefer tags which seems to work.

     sans-serif Noto Sans Open Sans Droid Sans Roboto Tholoth Noto Sans Arabic   serif Noto Serif Droid Serif Roboto Slab Tholoth Noto Sans Arabic   monospace Noto Sans Mono Inconsolata Droid Sans Mono Roboto Mono    

Japanese

Example fonts.conf which also specifies a default font for the Japanese locale (ja_JP) and keeps western style fonts for Latin letters.

      Noto Sans     ja  Noto Sans CJK JP     sans-serif  ja--> Noto Sans     serif  Noto Serif  IPAPMincho  HanaMinA     monospace  Noto Sans Mono  Inconsolatazi4  IPAGothic    sans-serif Noto Sans Open Sans Droid Sans Ubuntu Roboto NotoSansCJK Source Han Sans JP IPAPGothic VL PGothic Koruri   serif Noto Serif Droid Serif Roboto Slab IPAPMincho   monospace Noto Sans Mono Inconsolatazi4 Ubuntu Mono Droid Sans Mono Roboto Mono IPAGothic    

Chinese

~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf or /etc/fonts/local.conf

     false    serif  Noto Serif    sans-serif  Roboto    monospace  DejaVu Sans Mono    zh  serif  Source Han Serif CN    zh  sans-serif  Source Han Sans CN    zh  monospace  Noto Sans Mono CJK SC     WenQuanYi Zen Hei  Source Han Sans CN    WenQuanYi Micro Hei  Source Han Sans CN    WenQuanYi Micro Hei Light  Source Han Sans CN    Microsoft YaHei  Source Han Sans CN    SimHei  Source Han Sans CN    SimSun  Source Han Serif CN    SimSun-18030  Source Han Serif CN    

Chinese in Noto Fonts

Apply Noto Fonts while replacing Microsoft Fonts with WenQuanYi Micro Hei

~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf or /etc/fonts/local.conf

     false    serif  Noto Serif    sans-serif  Noto Sans    monospace  Noto Sans Mono    zh  serif  Noto Serif CJK SC    zh  sans-serif  Noto Sans CJK SC    zh  monospace  Noto Sans Mono CJK SC   WenQuanYi Micro Hei -->  WenQuanYi Zen Hei  WenQuanYi Micro Hei    WenQuanYi Zen Hei Lite  WenQuanYi Micro Hei Lite    WenQuanYi Zen Hei Mono  WenQuanYi Micro Hei Mono   WenQuanYi Micro Hei -->  Microsoft YaHei  WenQuanYi Micro Hei    SimHei  WenQuanYi Micro Hei    SimSun  WenQuanYi Micro Hei    SimSun-18030  WenQuanYi Micro Hei    

CJK, but other Latin fonts are preferred

You can replace PT Serif / Roboto / Cascadia Code PL with your favorite serif / sans-serif / monospace fonts.

~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf

     serif PT Serif    sans-serif Roboto    monospace Cascadia Code PL    system-ui Roboto       serif  Noto Serif CJK SC      ja  serif  Noto Serif CJK JP      ko  serif  Noto Serif CJK KR      zh  serif  Noto Serif CJK SC     zh-hans  serif  Noto Serif CJK SC     zh-hant  serif  Noto Serif CJK TC      zh-cn  serif  Noto Serif CJK SC     zh-tw  serif  Noto Serif CJK TC       sans-serif  Noto Sans CJK SC      ja  sans-serif  Noto Sans CJK JP      ko  sans-serif  Noto Sans CJK KR      zh  sans-serif  Noto Sans CJK SC     zh-hans  sans-serif  Noto Sans CJK SC     zh-hant  sans-serif  Noto Sans CJK TC     zh-hant-hk  sans-serif  Noto Sans CJK HK      zh-cn  sans-serif  Noto Sans CJK SC     zh-tw  sans-serif  Noto Sans CJK TC     zh-hk  sans-serif  Noto Sans CJK HK       monospace  Noto Sans Mono CJK SC      ja  monospace  Noto Sans Mono CJK JP      ko  monospace  Noto Sans Mono CJK KR      zh  monospace  Noto Sans Mono CJK SC     zh-hans  monospace  Noto Sans Mono CJK SC     zh-hant  monospace  Noto Sans Mono CJK TC     zh-hant-hk  monospace  Noto Sans Mono CJK HK      zh-cn  monospace  Noto Sans Mono CJK SC     zh-tw  monospace  Noto Sans Mono CJK TC     zh-hk  monospace  Noto Sans Mono CJK HK       system-ui  Noto Sans CJK SC      ja  system-ui  Noto Sans CJK JP      ko  system-ui  Noto Sans CJK KR      zh  system-ui  Noto Sans CJK SC     zh-hans  system-ui  Noto Sans CJK SC     zh-hant  system-ui  Noto Sans CJK TC     zh-hant-hk  system-ui  Noto Sans CJK HK      zh-cn  system-ui  Noto Sans CJK SC     zh-tw  system-ui  Noto Sans CJK TC     zh-hk  system-ui  Noto Sans CJK HK    

Alternate stylistic sets for fonts

Certain fonts come with alternate stylistic sets for characters through an OpenType feature. Generally these stylistic sets are named ss0x and contain small changes to individual characters. This shows how to change the default dotted zero to a slashed zero for the monospace version of ttf-ibm-plex .

~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf

See What are «Stylistic Sets?» for more information on this.

Источник

How to set default system font in CentOS?

I want to change system font used by applications globally (or per user) in CentOS. How to do that? Perhaps I should modify ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf file? I would like to set Tahoma font for applications like it was in WinXP.

Can you give some example applications you want to change to font in? Usually the way I would suggest is to change the GTK and Qt themes.

For example — NetBeans. I can set the font of NetBeans text editor, output window, etc., but not L&F font — the system font.

1 Answer 1

As a solution — inserted lines below to file /etc/fonts/fonts.conf :

   sans-serif Tahoma Arial   serif Times New Roman   monospace Courier New    false  true  false  hintfull   

Then updated font cache with fc-cache . Now desired fonts available system wide.

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