Fonts

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Resources

Fonts are a core part of the system and are necessary in order to represent text on a display.

Font installation in Gentoo is handled much like other distributions. It can be as easy as copying the font file into the proper directory. Other methods, such as fontconfig are also possible.

Home directory

When installing fonts on a local basis, each user can create a .local/share/fonts directory in their home directory. This directory can then be filled with font files:

user $

mkdir -p ~/.local/share/fonts

user $

cp ~/Downloads/Inconsolata.otf ~/.local/share/fonts

Note
Historically, the ~/.fonts directory was used to store fonts on a per-user basis. The modern equivalent is ~/.local/share/fonts.

Note
Fonts can also be installed in a subfolder of the ~/.local/share/fonts directory.

Check in a few applications to see if the newly copied font has been made available. A terminal emulator or an office program should work nicely for this purpose.

Globally available

System administrators (those with root privileges) can copy fonts into the system's /usr/share/fonts directory. This will make fonts available to any user on the system.

root #cp /home/larry/Downloads/Inconsolata.otf /usr/share/fonts

Console font

OpenRC

In order to use a specific font in the console, set the consolefont variable in /etc/conf.d/consolefont to the name of a file found in /usr/share/consolefonts/ (without the .psfu.gz suffix).

FILE /etc/conf.d/consolefontSetting the console font

consolefont="lat9w-16"

Next add consolefont init script to boot runlevel:

root #rc-update add consolefont boot

If you need bigger fonts and more modern looking fonts for HD screens you should install media-fonts/terminus-font. It has fonts with sizes from 12 to 32 pixels.

GUI font

To configure fonts for use in graphical applications see the Fontconfig article.

Font installation to support viewing more scripts

Emoji and symbols

root #emerge --ask media-fonts/noto-emoji

Currently available through the GURU overlay:

root #emerge --ask media-fonts/symbola

Non-Latin scripts

Gentoo doesn't install many fonts by default so some characters in some languages may look like squares. If full support of viewing all languages and characters is needed, install the fonts for the following languages.

Language	Package(s)
Bengali	media-fonts/lohit-bengali
Japanese	media-fonts/mikachan-font-ttf
Korean	media-fonts/alee-fonts
Persian	media-fonts/farsi-fonts
Tamil	media-fonts/lohit-tamil
Thai	media-fonts/thaifonts-scalable

Additional package considerations

media-fonts/noto (part of media-fonts/fonts-meta):

root #emerge --ask media-fonts/noto

media-fonts/fonts-meta (Meta package for fonts to cover most needs):

root #emerge --ask media-fonts/fonts-meta

Microsoft's TrueType media-fonts/corefonts:

root #emerge --ask media-fonts/corefonts

Configuring fonts in applications

The way programs handle fonts can be different for every program. But most applications follow a certain convention. They accept the name of the font as a variable for their font configuration. The following command will give the list of all fonts that are currently available to the user issuing it (all fonts in ~/.local/share/fonts and /usr/share/fonts).

user $fc-list

...
/usr/share/fonts/FiraCode-Medium.ttf: Fira Code,Fira Code Medium:style=Medium,Regular
...

Here, the first field after the : (Fira Code in this case) is the family of the font that should be used in the configuration of most applications.

External resources

https://fontlibrary.org/ - A font distribution website that beautifully displays fonts.