How do I install fonts for X?

uxer

Problems/tasks:

MesloLGS NF *.ttf font for Tide prompt for Fish shell
They say:

Open each file and click "Install". This will make the MesloLGS NF font available to all applications on your system. Configure your terminal to use this font.

but it presumes an installed font viewer, and among ports did I only manage to find gnome-font-viewer which depends on gnome, I believe there is a way to install a font without installing gnome.

There are Meslo fonts in powerline-fonts package, yet they are not the same Meslo and some glyphs are missing.

I have failed in attempts to install fonts with mkfontdir and mkfontscale

pfr

uxer

Create a fonts folder somwhere, /usr/local/share/fonts/ OR ~/.fonts, ~~wherever, it wont really matter.~~
Put the *.ttf in this folder then run doas fc-cache -v

By default I think fonts are kept in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts, so perhaps create a TTF folder in there?

EDIT:

pin I'd rather dump them in ${PREFIX}/share/fonts/X11/TTF/

Do this instead.

rvp

uxer I have failed in attempts to install fonts with mkfontdir and mkfontscale

You don't really need to those commands for .ttf fonts. Just dump the fonts into one of the directories specified in /etc/fonts/fonts.conf and they're ready to use.

uxer but it presumes an installed font viewer,

The system comes with xfd

pfr By default I think fonts are kept in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts, so perhaps create a TTF folder in there?

I'd rather dump them in ${PREFIX}/share/fonts/X11/TTF/ and keep it as third party stuff instead of making a mess in the base system 😉

JuvenalUrbino

pfr Create a fonts folder somwhere, /usr/local/share/fonts/ OR ~/.fonts, wherever, it wont really matter.

It does however. The paths searched for fonts by fc-cache are those included in the fontconfig configuration, which for the unprivileged user is ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf . The system-wide configuration resides at /etc/fonts/fonts.conf. If you inspect the latter file you'll see that the only included font paths are, by default, ~/.fonts and ~/.local/share/fonts (with standard XDG user dirs).

pfr

pin I'd rather dump them in ${PREFIX}/share/fonts/X11/TTF/ and keep it as third party stuff instead of making a mess in the base system

Yeah, that is actually what I've done on my system. I just forgot about it 😆