Anyone out there remember the old X core font system?

[Evan Martin]

On 4/5/07, Jim Gettys <jg at laptop.org> wrote:
> I've been beating my head against the wall trying to resurrect my
> knowledge in this are (tempered by 20 years, and its evolution in the
> intervening period).  But it isn't clear I can (re)learn this stuff very
> quickly.
>
> Basically, the ideal would be to alias the common X11 core bitmap fonts
> (e.g. those canonically found in the X11/misc and X11/100dpi font
> directories) to vague approximations in the DejaVu outline fonts.  Since
> we run so high resolution, the bitmaps generated won't be to terrible.

I seem to recall at some point that X servers could understand
truetype fonts and use them directly(?).  You can find lots of old
docs (try Google queries with terms like "xf86config" in them) that
describe how to configure this.

My guess is you can do something like:
1) cd /path/to/ttf/files
2) ttmkfdir > fonts.dir
3) xset fp+ `pwd`; xset fp rehash
4) xlsfonts (and find out the font name)
5) make a fonts.alias that redirects fixed to that ttf alias