Changing fonts

Font aliases

Another way to abbreviate font names is to create a font alias, a shorter name that is used as an alternative to the full font name. Font aliases are specified in a file called fonts.alias. By default, the three directories misc, 75dpi, and 100dpi in /usr/lib/X11/fonts each contain a fonts.alias file. If you add new font directories to your system, you can create fonts.alias files for those directories too.

The default fonts.alias files already contain several aliases. You should study these files as you will probably find the aliases are more convenient to use then specifying full font names, or even wildcarded names. Of course, you are free to change the existing aliases, add new aliases, or even replace the entire file, although this should be done with caution. Generally, it is a good idea to simply add new aliases to the existing files.

NOTE: The first two entries in the fonts.alias file in /usr/lib/X11/misc should not be changed or removed. These entries are shown below:

   fixed    -misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1
   variable -*-helvetica-bold-r-normal-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1

Many client font resource specifications use these aliases and if you remove them the clients will not be able to display a font.

The fonts.alias files use a two-column format, much like the fonts.dir file. The first column contains the aliases and the second column contains the full names of the fonts being aliased.

When creating aliases, you should be aware of the following:

To specify an alias that contains spaces, enclose the alias in double quotation marks.
To include double quotation marks, backslashes, or other special characters in your alias, precede each special character with a backslash.
If you create an alias or an alias file while running an X server, the server does not automatically recognize the additions. You must reset the server to activate new aliases.