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
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.
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…