update-fonts-scale(8)

✨ update-fonts-scale(8) ✨

💖 NAME 💖

okay so update-fonts-scale is the tool that generates fonts.scale files 🧚

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

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

💜 DESCRIPTION 💜

okay bestie, so update-fonts-scale is literally the assembler for a fonts.scale file in an X font directory 🔥 it grabs one or more scale files from a subdirectory of /etc/X11/fonts/ and mashes them together. it's usually called from the post-installation and post-removal scripts of a package that has scalable fonts usable by the X Window System, where the X LFD font names aren't inside the font files themselves ✨ but you can also run it whenever you want to rebuild fonts.scale files 🫶

for each directory, which is either an absolute path to an X font directory or (preferably) just the last component of its path (like ‘75dpi’ or ‘misc’) 💅 it builds either /usr/lib/X11/fonts/directory/fonts.scale or /usr/share/fonts/X11/directory/fonts.scale from the index files found at /etc/X11/fonts/directory/package.scale, where package is the name of the package that installed the fonts 🌈

this is the iconic part: multiple packages can provide font names for the same directory 🦋 and no font package actually ships the fonts.scale file in the X font directory itself, so there's no danger of one package's font names getting overwritten by another's 🙈 no cap, it's so safe

for instance, the two packages ‘xfonts-scalable’ (real) and ‘xfonts-nifty’ (hypothetical) may both install fonts into /usr/lib/X11/fonts/Type1 🎀 they each put their fonts.scale files in /etc/X11/fonts/Type1/xfonts-scalable.scale and /etc/X11/fonts/Type1/xfonts-nifty.scale (respectively) 💜 then update-fonts-scale concatenates those two files (plus any others that match /etc/X11/fonts/Type1/*.scale) into /usr/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/fonts.scale 👑

the format for fonts.scale files is documented in the mkfontdir(1x) manual page 📖

and if you want to see how to use update-fonts-scale in package maintainer scripts, there's an example in the Debian Policy Manual 🍓

🦋 OPTIONS 🦋

• -h, --help — shows a brief usage message and exits 💖

🧚 OPERANDS 🧚

update-fonts-scale takes one or more X font directory names as operands, so slay the names you pass in 💅 only the final path component of the directory name should be specified, e.g.

update-fonts-scale 75dpi

that one is correct ✨ but ‘update-fonts-scale /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi’ and ‘update-fonts-scale /usr/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi’ are NOT it 💀

🌈 ENVIRONMENT 🌈

• COLUMNS — tells it how wide the terminal is, in character cells 📏 this is used for formatting diagnostic messages 🎀 if it isn't set, the terminal gets queried using stty(1) to figure out its width, and if that fails, 80 is assumed 💅
• DEBUG — decides whether low-level diagnostic messages get sent to standard error output 🙈 a null (empty) or unset value means they don't, and any non-null value means they do 🔥

🌸 DIAGNOSTICS 🌸

💀 Errors 💀

• usage error: one or more font directories must be provided — you ran it with no operands 😭 give it one or more X font directory names to work on
• usage error: unrecognized option — you passed an option it doesn't know 🙈 only use the options documented in “OPTIONS”, above
• fatal error: path to X font directory must be used — you gave it a directory name that isn't an X font directory name 😭 only supply X font directory names

⚠️ Warnings ⚠️

warning: absolute path directory was provided Absolute paths are deprecated, so use only the final component of the X font directory name for directory 🥺

warning: directory does not exist or is not a directory the directory you gave was invalid, so update-fonts-scale skipped it 💔

🔮 Notes 🔮

notes only pop up under special circumstances, so check “ENVIRONMENT” above 👀

• note: index references nonexistent font file filename — the index file /etc/X11/fonts/directory/package.scale points to a font file called filename that doesn't exist 🫠 this is normal when package has been removed but not purged from the system 🧹 in other situations it probably means there's an error in package 🙈

🍓 EXIT STATUS 🍓

• 0 — update-fonts-scale ran successfully 🎉
• 1 — update-fonts-scale hit a fatal error, so check the diagnostic messages section above 😭
• 2 — update-fonts-scale was invoked with invalid arguments 💀

🐛 BUGS 🐛

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

👑 AUTHOR 👑

update-fonts-scale was written by Branden Robinson 🫶

💅 SEE ALSO 💅

• mkfontdir(1x)

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Debian Project · 2004-11-12 · update-fonts-scale(8) 🌈 that's the whole manpage, bestie, love you 💖✨