#[SOLVED] How to check which system wide, default font is being used currently?

12 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

quiet grotto
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So I'm playing around with tiling window managers, no DE and some terminal emulators. By default there are no configuration file for anything currently in my ~/.config directory. So I think everything is using the default font? I installed Kitty and the font seems to be truncated from above although everything works fine in alacritty. Now I want to know

  1. How/what sets the default font (one when no config file is present) and what commands are there to change/query it?
  2. Does everything uses the same default font when there are no config file present for applications?
  3. After config files are created, is there still a way to override the font for every application and use the system wide font?

here is a screencap of fonts being truncated in kitty. I'm inside a virtualbox btw.

image.png
royal mica
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for 1 lxappearance lets u set the default font idk about 2 and 3 tho

quiet grotto
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Thanks but I'm more interested in understanding how/where the default font comes from when there is nothing present, no config files, no software to change fonts etc.

quiet grotto
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well the font issue in the kitty terminal was due to the virtual box. Disabled 3d acceleration and reinstalled guest additions and everything seems to work now. That's one thing out of the way

sick girder
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Technically speaking, it's up to the developer of the app, they can bundle a font with their app to use it by default, they can decide to crash if the font they are looking for is not present or they can decide to just not write anything on the GUI of the app etc..

Developers do not usually write GUI apps completely from scratch (even when they do, they won't be insane enough to do what i've described earlier).

Developers usually use widget toolkits such as Gtk and Qt.
Gtk and Qt (and other sane toolkits) use "fontconfig" to do all font related stuff.

Lxappearance and other apps like it are just GUIs for configuring fontconfig by editing it's configuration file.

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how/what sets the default font
fontconfig decides which font is the default one.
apps may ask fontconfig: "hey what's the default font ?".
after getting an answer, the app can do whatever it want with that information, it can use that font, or use a different one.

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Does everything uses the same default font
only if everything respect fontconfig, which is usually the case

quiet grotto
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Hey thanks this helped a lot

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I'll dive into this and open up a new issue incase I run into some problems

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[SOLVED] How to check which system wide, default font is being used currently?

sick girder
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Feel free to research and ask more questions, my reply is very incomplete