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Chapter 15.
Providing Consistent Fonts with Font Servers
Every child in our culture learns the shapes
of letters at an early age. Precisely what are those shapes, though? A single
letter may be formed in many different ways. For instance, consider the letter P that begins the title of this chapter. In the
chapter title font, this letter looks different than it does at the beginning
of the second sentence of this paragraph. This, in turn, is different from a
variant such as an italic P. These are examples
of different fonts in use. A font is a design
for all the characters in the alphabet, usually in both upper- and lowercase,
as well as numbers and supporting characters such as punctuation symbols. A few
exotic fonts aren't alphabetic at all; they contain nothing but special
symbols. In any event, fonts are critical for modern computers because users
today expect to be able to select from among many different fonts when using
highly textual programs like word processors and Web browsers. Sometimes this
ability is extremely important, as in electronic publishing tasks. In other
cases, it's more of a convenience, as when you select a font for reading your
e-mail.One approach to font handling that's possible
with Linux is to use a font server. This is a
server that has access to a collection of fonts, and can deliver those fonts to
clients on a network. It might at first seem that a font server is fairly
pointlessafter all, individual computers handle their own fonts quite well in
the Windows and MacOS worlds, and even Linux systems are configured this way by
default. There are situations, though, in which a font server can ease your
administrative tasks or help you achieve goals that might not otherwise be
achievable. To use a font server, it helps to understand something about the
file formats used to store fonts, because these formats can be used in
different ways and have different plusses and minuses. Most Linux font servers
handle a limited set of tasks, defined as part of the X Window System. A few,
though, expand on this set of tasks. Some programs, such as some word
processors, rely upon these expanded font servers to help them do their jobs.
