fettig.net

Using your OS X fonts in The Gimp

Posted by Abe on Saturday, April 3, 2004 @ 5:10 pm

If you’ve installed TrueType fonts under your user account in OS X, you can make them available to Gimp.app (or, probably, any other gtk2 application) by linking your ~/Library/Fonts folder to ~/.fonts, which is where Gimp’s font library looks for user-specific fonts. In other words, just type “ln -s ~/Library/Fonts ~/.fonts” in a terminal window, and the next time you run Gimp all your user fonts will be available.

This is, as far as I can tell, an exclusive tip for Fettig.net readers! I just figured it out, and haven’t seen it anywhere else online.

Update, 4/22

Thanks to Alf Eaton at HubLog for correcting an error: I mistakenly wrote ~/System/Fonts instead of ~/Library/Fonts. I’ve corrected that now. Alf also discovered that you can add both system and user-level fonts to the Gimp by using sub-directories of ~/.fonts. For example:

mkdir ~/.fonts
ln -s /Library/Fonts ~/.fonts/sys
ln -s ~/Library/Fonts ~/.fonts/user

2 Comments

  1. OS X fonts in GTK2/Gimp

    Abe Fettig finally has a solution that allows using your OS X fonts in The Gimp. Well, almost, it should be ~/Library/Fonts rather than ~/System/Fonts: In a Terminal window, enter ln -s ~/Library/Fonts ~/.fonts which will create a symbolic link between…

    Trackback by HubLog — April 20, 2004 @ 9:24 am

  2. An alternative is to use the ~/.fonts.conf configuration file to override or augment the default config, for example:

    <fontconfig>
    <dir>~/Library/Fonts</dir>
    <dir>/Library/Fonts</dir>
    </fontconfig>

    You can also modify behaviour, for example to tweak or enable sub-pixel rendering:

    <fontconfig>
    <match target=”font”>
    <test qual=”all” name=”rgba”>
    <const>unknown</const>
    </test>
    <edit name=”rgba” mode=”assign”><const>rgb</const></edit>
    </match>
    </fontconfig>

    See /etc/fonts/fonts.conf for the default configuration. Also see http://fontconfig.freedesktop.org/ for more on fontconfig.

    Comment by Michael Twomey — April 23, 2004 @ 5:25 am

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