font

Web

Apparently, browsers are shifting towards the WOFF and WOFF 2 standard (https://caniuse.com/#feat=woff and https://caniuse.com/#feat=woff2).

Linux

The standard Linux font format is PSF (the PC Screen Fonts).

If a font provides both, TTF and OTF, the OTF is to be preferred as it provides more features to programs who know how to use them.

Fontconfig / Xft

Fontconfig is a library for font management: it locates and selects fonts in the system based on criteria requested by an application (such as font family, style, language support).

Fontconfig comes with a few programs:

`fc-match`	Test matching ruiles
`fc-list`	List installed fonts
`fc-cache`	Maintenance of the fontconfig cache
`fc-cat`	Dump the binar cache files in string form

Fontconfig does not depend on the X Window System.

Xft is an X-specific library that uses fontconfig (and freetype) to specify and rasterize fonts.

Installing a TTF font

The following command sequence supposedly installs a TTF on a Linux system:

cp xyz.ttf /usr/share/fonts/truetype
cd         /usr/share/fonts/truetype
mkfontscale     # creates file fonts.scale
mkfontdir       # creates file fonts.dir
fc-cache
xset fp rehash

Check if font is installed:

fc-list | grep xyz

FreeType2

FreeType2 is a library to render TrueType fonts.

Information about the installed library can be obtained with

freetype-config --version
freetype-config --libtools
freetype-config --libs

etc.

CID fonts

CID = character indexed.

A CID font consists of

a glyph file and
a mapping (CMap) file

The CMap defines the mapping between the characters in the font and the encoding used to address them.

CID font names are a concatenation of the name of the font and the name of the CMap.