update-fonts-alias(8)

✨ update-fonts-alias(8) ✨

💖 NAME 💖

update-fonts-alias — compile fonts.alias files 🎀

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

update-fonts-alias [OPTION] directory ...

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

okay so update-fonts-alias is the tool that assembles a fonts.alias file in an X font directory, using one or more alias files found in a subdirectory of /etc/X11/fonts/. 💅 It's typically only invoked from the post-installation and post-removal scripts of a package containing X Window System fonts that provide aliases for their XLFD names, but it can be run at any time to rebuild fonts.alias files. ✨ For each directory (which is just the last component of its path, like ‘75dpi’ or ‘misc’), it builds either /usr/lib/X11/fonts/directory/fonts.alias or /usr/share/fonts/X11/directory/fonts.alias from the files found in /etc/X11/fonts/directory/package.alias. 🧚

this is iconic bc it lets multiple packages provide aliases for fonts in the same directory 🫶 No font package actually provides the fonts.alias file in the X font directory itself, so nobody can accidentally overwrite somebody else's aliases. 😭 no cap, that's so safe.

for example 🌈 the two packages ‘xfonts-base’ and ‘xfonts-base-transcoded’ may both install fonts into /usr/lib/X11/fonts/misc. They each put their fonts.alias files in /etc/X11/fonts/misc/xfonts-base.alias and /etc/X11/fonts/misc/xfonts-base-transcoded.alias (respectively). update-fonts-alias concatenates these two files (plus any others that match /etc/X11/fonts/misc/*.alias) into /usr/lib/X11/fonts/misc/fonts.alias. 🍓

the format of fonts.alias files is described in the mkfontdir(1x) manual page. 📖

there's also an example of how to use update-fonts-alias in package maintainer scripts in the Debian Policy Manual. 🙈

🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

• -h, --help — displays a brief usage message and exits. 💜

🧁 OPERANDS 🧁

update-fonts-alias takes one or more X font directory names as operands. ✨ Only the final path component of the directory name should be specified, e.g.:

update-fonts-alias 75dpi

that one is correct ✅, while ‘update-fonts-alias /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi’ and ‘update-fonts-alias /usr/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi’ are not. 🙅‍♀️

🌷 ENVIRONMENT 🌷

• COLUMNS — indicates the width of the terminal device in character cells. 💅 This value is used for formatting diagnostic messages. If it's not set, the terminal is queried using stty(1) to figure out its width. If that fails, a value of 80 is assumed. 🫶

🚨 DIAGNOSTICS 🚨

💀 Errors 💀

• usage error: one or more font directories must be provided — update-fonts-alias was run without operands. Supply one or more X font directory names to operate on. 🙈
• usage error: unrecognized option — update-fonts-alias was invoked with an option it doesn't recognize. Only use the options documented in “OPTIONS”, above. 😤
• fatal error: path to X font directory must be used — you gave a directory name that isn't an X font directory name. Supply X font directory names only. 😭

⚠️ Warnings ⚠️

• warning: absolute path directory was provided — > absolute paths are deprecated, bestie! 🥺 Only use the final component of the X font directory name for directory.
• warning: directory does not exist or is not a directory — the directory you supplied was invalid, so update-fonts-alias skipped it. 🫠

🦢 EXIT STATUS 🦢

• 0 — update-fonts-alias ran successfully. 👑
• 1 — update-fonts-alias hit a fatal error. Check the diagnostic messages section above. 💔
• 2 — update-fonts-alias was invoked with invalid arguments. 🙃

🐛 BUGS 🐛

see the Debian Bug Tracking System at ⟨https://bugs.debian.org/xfonts-utils⟩. 🔍 If you want to report a bug in update-fonts-alias, check out /usr/share/doc/debian/bug-reporting.txt or the reportbug(1) command. 🐞

👩‍💻 AUTHOR 👩‍💻

update-fonts-alias was written by Branden Robinson. 👑

🔗 SEE ALSO 🔗

• mkfontdir(1x) 🌈

bestie that's the whole thing 💖 update-fonts-alias(8) from the Debian Project, dated 2004-11-11, fr fr the whole vibe is preserved 🦋✨