Where does xorg get its fonts from?

[hazel]

I remember that when I used to use XFree87, there was a thing called the X-font server (xfs) that ran as a background daemon. All the writing on X depended on it. There doesn't seem to be anything like that now. Does xserver-xorg get its fonts directly from the fonts directory under /usr/share? I'm just curious.

[i92guboj]

I remember that when I used to use XFree87, there was a thing called the X-font server (xfs) that ran as a background daemon. All the writing on X depended on it. There doesn't seem to be anything like that now. Does xserver-xorg get its fonts directly from the fonts directory under /usr/share? I'm just curious.

I assume you meant xfree86. However, the xfs font server has been deprecated for a long time. I really find no use for it nowadays, where people usually prefer to use client side fonts instead of a remote font server (to use xfs locally has even less sense, since it's an unnecessary overhead). Xft takes care of the biggest part of the issue.

As far as I know, latest versions do not need too much configuration on the user's side. All the fonts under /usr/share/fonts should work out of the box, as will do all the fonts under ~/.fonts/ for user fonts. You can as well add paths on your xorg.conf if needed.

I never looked too deep on this, it's really not something that I need to know more about. I suppose that the man/info pages related to xft and fontconfig and their docs might be interesting if you need more info.