How to restore original system fonts in F12? [SOLVED]

[Kirk Lowery]

On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 9:14 AM, Kirk Lowery
<empirical.humanist at gmail.com>wrote:

> Okay. I screwed up. It happens, okay?
>
> I was playing around with Fontmatrix. I was trying to figure out how to
> deactivate a *single* font. All of a sudden, wush! All the desktop fonts
> changed to something ugly. I tried to reactivate every font using
> Fontmatrix, rebooted, but no change.
>
> How do I get back to using the default F12 desktop font assignments?
>
> Thanks!
>
> Kirk
>

I figured out how to restore the original system fonts, and I thought I'd
report it here, since this seems to be less well-known knowledge:

1. The key is in understanding how fontconfig (
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/deployment-guide/f12/en-US/html/s1-x-fonts.html)
works and how Fontmatrix interacts with it.

I compared my home directory with a colleagues whose F12 system was working
right. My directory had three relevant files/directories: .fontconfig,
.fonts and .fonts.config. My colleague had just one: .fontconfig. Now,
.fonts is the directory for installing local fonts, which is okay, since I
had installed some special fonts I use. This means the .fonts.config file
was something added by Fontmatrix. Indeed, looking at the xml file there was
a long list of system fonts tagged as <rejected>!? To clear the problem:

2. yum erase fontmatrix

3. rm -rf ~/.Fontmatrix

4. rm ~/.fonts.config

5. logged out as my user; logged back in. This restarted X, which is the
essential task.

I probably didn't have to remove Fontmatrix and the .Fontmatrix directory.
But I wanted to start with a clean set up. Probably all I needed to do was
remove .fonts.config and restart X.

Hope this helps someone else recover when fonts go crazy. :-)

Kirk
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/users/attachments/20100127/29d23c3d/attachment.html