Subject: Re: bug#38498: Fontconfig does not find fonts in non-default profiles

From: Pierre Neidhardt <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 13 Dec 2019 14:11:13 +0100

Just read this:
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/fontconfig/fontconfig/issues/126

Could we do the following: use a profile hook to generate a config file
and set the environment variable FONTCONFIG_FILE to this file?

(I feel that we can't do that because the path of the hook-generated
cannot be known in advance.)

I looked at what NixOS does in
nixpkgs/pkgs/development/libraries/fontconfig/default.nix:

>  - NixOS creates /etc/fonts/${configVersion}/fonts.conf link to $out/etc/fonts/fonts.conf,
>     and other modifications should go to /etc/fonts/${configVersion}/conf.d

We don't have a global font folder and we probably don't want to have
one, so I guess this is not ideal.

The <dir> fontconfig setting in Nix is

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
      <!-- nix user profile -->
      <dir>~/.nix-profile/lib/X11/fonts</dir>
      <dir>~/.nix-profile/share/fonts</dir>
      <!-- nix default profile -->
      <dir>/nix/var/nix/profiles/default/lib/X11/fonts</dir>
      <dir>/nix/var/nix/profiles/default/share/fonts</dir>
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

so it probably suffers from the same issue.

-- 
Pierre Neidhardt
https://ambrevar.xyz/