Default fonts are being overridden upon installation

[Munzu]

My system: Arch Linux 5.8.3-arch-1-1
Package manager: yay (pacman)

I think through a chain of dependencies, this was installed on my system.
(I installed font-manager, which installed vala, which installed graphviz, which installed gsfonts, which lists this repo as the upstream URL)

When I installed font-manager, my default system fonts (such as the monospace font used in my terminal and dmenu) were overridden from Noto to Nimbus. I checked that using

• fc-match monospace
• fc-match sans-serif
• fc-match serif

which all returned a Nimbus variant.

I found out that gsfonts was the package that installed Nimbus on my system.
(After I uninstalled gsfonts, my fonts thankfully went back to normal; checking with fc-match returns Noto variants again.)

Is this expected behavior? If it is, I find it quite intrusive. It took me a while to track down the problem on my system.

Could this be related to #13 ?

[fabiangreffrath]

This may well be related to #13, but as the bug log shows, it is not the fonts themselves that hijack the preferred places for the "monospace" etc. aliases. It is a fontconfig issue, and the way fontconfig is configured is all up to your distribution.

If you are on Arch, could you please post the output of the pacman -Fl gsfonts command?

While packaging the fonts for Debian, I found that sorting the fontconfig rules with a priority higher than 61, i.e. with a smaller numerical prefix, lead to similar issues that you describe. Also, I found the urw-urw-fallback-specifics.conf rule to be offensive and removed it from the package.

[fabiangreffrath]

This doc is relevant:
https://github.com/ArtifexSoftware/urw-base35-fonts/blob/master/fontconfig/README.md

[Munzu]

Thanks for the quick reply.

I reinstalled the dependency chain which installs gsfonts.
pacman -Fl gsfonts (or yay -Fl gsfonts for that matter) then returns the following for me:

gsfonts etc/
gsfonts etc/fonts/
gsfonts etc/fonts/conf.avail/
gsfonts etc/fonts/conf.avail/69-urw-bookman.conf
gsfonts etc/fonts/conf.avail/69-urw-c059.conf
gsfonts etc/fonts/conf.avail/69-urw-d050000l.conf
gsfonts etc/fonts/conf.avail/69-urw-fallback-backwards.conf
gsfonts etc/fonts/conf.avail/69-urw-fallback-generics.conf
gsfonts etc/fonts/conf.avail/69-urw-fallback-specifics.conf
gsfonts etc/fonts/conf.avail/69-urw-gothic.conf
gsfonts etc/fonts/conf.avail/69-urw-nimbus-mono-ps.conf
gsfonts etc/fonts/conf.avail/69-urw-nimbus-roman.conf
gsfonts etc/fonts/conf.avail/69-urw-nimbus-sans.conf
gsfonts etc/fonts/conf.avail/69-urw-p052.conf
gsfonts etc/fonts/conf.avail/69-urw-standard-symbols-ps.conf
gsfonts etc/fonts/conf.avail/69-urw-z003.conf
gsfonts etc/fonts/conf.d/
gsfonts etc/fonts/conf.d/69-urw-bookman.conf
gsfonts etc/fonts/conf.d/69-urw-c059.conf
gsfonts etc/fonts/conf.d/69-urw-d050000l.conf
gsfonts etc/fonts/conf.d/69-urw-fallback-backwards.conf
gsfonts etc/fonts/conf.d/69-urw-fallback-generics.conf
gsfonts etc/fonts/conf.d/69-urw-fallback-specifics.conf
gsfonts etc/fonts/conf.d/69-urw-gothic.conf
gsfonts etc/fonts/conf.d/69-urw-nimbus-mono-ps.conf
gsfonts etc/fonts/conf.d/69-urw-nimbus-roman.conf
gsfonts etc/fonts/conf.d/69-urw-nimbus-sans.conf
gsfonts etc/fonts/conf.d/69-urw-p052.conf
gsfonts etc/fonts/conf.d/69-urw-standard-symbols-ps.conf
gsfonts etc/fonts/conf.d/69-urw-z003.conf
gsfonts usr/
gsfonts usr/share/
gsfonts usr/share/fonts/
gsfonts usr/share/fonts/gsfonts/
gsfonts usr/share/fonts/gsfonts/C059-BdIta.otf
gsfonts usr/share/fonts/gsfonts/C059-Bold.otf
gsfonts usr/share/fonts/gsfonts/C059-Italic.otf
gsfonts usr/share/fonts/gsfonts/C059-Roman.otf
gsfonts usr/share/fonts/gsfonts/D050000L.otf
gsfonts usr/share/fonts/gsfonts/NimbusMonoPS-Bold.otf
gsfonts usr/share/fonts/gsfonts/NimbusMonoPS-BoldItalic.otf
gsfonts usr/share/fonts/gsfonts/NimbusMonoPS-Italic.otf
gsfonts usr/share/fonts/gsfonts/NimbusMonoPS-Regular.otf
gsfonts usr/share/fonts/gsfonts/NimbusRoman-Bold.otf
gsfonts usr/share/fonts/gsfonts/NimbusRoman-BoldItalic.otf
gsfonts usr/share/fonts/gsfonts/NimbusRoman-Italic.otf
gsfonts usr/share/fonts/gsfonts/NimbusRoman-Regular.otf
gsfonts usr/share/fonts/gsfonts/NimbusSans-Bold.otf
gsfonts usr/share/fonts/gsfonts/NimbusSans-BoldItalic.otf
gsfonts usr/share/fonts/gsfonts/NimbusSans-Italic.otf
gsfonts usr/share/fonts/gsfonts/NimbusSans-Regular.otf
gsfonts usr/share/fonts/gsfonts/NimbusSansNarrow-Bold.otf
gsfonts usr/share/fonts/gsfonts/NimbusSansNarrow-BoldOblique.otf
gsfonts usr/share/fonts/gsfonts/NimbusSansNarrow-Oblique.otf
gsfonts usr/share/fonts/gsfonts/NimbusSansNarrow-Regular.otf
gsfonts usr/share/fonts/gsfonts/P052-Bold.otf
gsfonts usr/share/fonts/gsfonts/P052-BoldItalic.otf
gsfonts usr/share/fonts/gsfonts/P052-Italic.otf
gsfonts usr/share/fonts/gsfonts/P052-Roman.otf
gsfonts usr/share/fonts/gsfonts/StandardSymbolsPS.otf
gsfonts usr/share/fonts/gsfonts/URWBookman-Demi.otf
gsfonts usr/share/fonts/gsfonts/URWBookman-DemiItalic.otf
gsfonts usr/share/fonts/gsfonts/URWBookman-Light.otf
gsfonts usr/share/fonts/gsfonts/URWBookman-LightItalic.otf
gsfonts usr/share/fonts/gsfonts/URWGothic-Book.otf
gsfonts usr/share/fonts/gsfonts/URWGothic-BookOblique.otf
gsfonts usr/share/fonts/gsfonts/URWGothic-Demi.otf
gsfonts usr/share/fonts/gsfonts/URWGothic-DemiOblique.otf
gsfonts usr/share/fonts/gsfonts/Z003-MediumItalic.otf
gsfonts usr/share/metainfo/
gsfonts usr/share/metainfo/de.urwpp.C059.metainfo.xml
gsfonts usr/share/metainfo/de.urwpp.D050000L.metainfo.xml
gsfonts usr/share/metainfo/de.urwpp.NimbusMonoPS.metainfo.xml
gsfonts usr/share/metainfo/de.urwpp.NimbusRoman.metainfo.xml
gsfonts usr/share/metainfo/de.urwpp.NimbusSans.metainfo.xml
gsfonts usr/share/metainfo/de.urwpp.P052.metainfo.xml
gsfonts usr/share/metainfo/de.urwpp.StandardSymbolsPS.metainfo.xml
gsfonts usr/share/metainfo/de.urwpp.URWBookman.metainfo.xml
gsfonts usr/share/metainfo/de.urwpp.URWCoreFontSetLevel2.metainfo.xml
gsfonts usr/share/metainfo/de.urwpp.URWGothic.metainfo.xml
gsfonts usr/share/metainfo/de.urwpp.Z003.metainfo.xml

[fabiangreffrath]

Hm, doesn't look too wrong to me.