Overview of the Font Scheme Panel

Documentation / Contents - Font Scheme

• Overview of the Font Scheme Panel
  • Fonts and Colours Are Separate
  • What Sets It Apart
• The Nine Roles
  • The House Voice
  • The Small and Tiny Sizes
  • Partial Schemes
• Using the Panel
  • The Scheme List
  • The Role Rows
  • Changing One Role
  • The Buttons
    • Apply
    • Save and Save As
    • Defaults and Revert
    • Close
  • Following the Desktop
• Font Descriptors
  • The Leading Dash Is the Whole Rule
  • When the Resolved Font Differs
  • Reading the Nine Samples
• Point Size, DPI, and Why Layout Holds
  • Where DPI Comes From
  • The Panel Fits Itself Before It Draws
  • Changing the Desktop DPI
  • Bitmap Fonts and the Core Path
  • Looking at What a Canonical Application Will Get
• Where Font Schemes Live
  • The Search Path
  • The File
  • Two Names
  • The Built-in Defaults
• Command Line and Keys
  • Command Line
  • Keys
    • On the Main Panel
    • In the Font Dialog
• Fonts, Colours, and the Rest of the Desktop
  • Colour Schemes
  • Monitor Settings and DPI
  • The Scheme Daemon

Other cards

• Copyright Information

The Font Scheme Panel

The Font Scheme panel is where you choose the typefaces the whole desktop wears. It is to type what the Background panel is to the wallpaper and the Color Scheme browser is to colour: one place, one setting, every application follows it.

The program is cyfont-prefs. Its window is titled "Font Scheme".

A font scheme is a file that binds each of nine named roles to a font. You do not set the font for one application. You set the nine roles, and every application that draws a label, a list row or a block of preformatted text asks for the role rather than for a font.

Fonts and Colours Are Separate

A font scheme carries no colour, and a colour scheme carries no font. Any font scheme mixes with any colour scheme, and changing one leaves the other alone. Colour schemes are covered in their own book; see Fonts, Colours, and the Rest of the Desktop.

In This Book

• The Nine Roles
• Using the Panel
• Font Descriptors
• Point Size, DPI, and Why Layout Holds
• Where Font Schemes Live
• Command Line and Keys
• Fonts, Colours, and the Rest of the Desktop

What Sets It Apart

Down the right of the panel are the nine roles, one row each, and every row's sample is painted in that role's own face. That is the point of the panel and not decoration. A role that failed to resolve, or two roles that quietly collapsed onto the same font, are invisible in a table of descriptor strings and obvious the moment you look at nine differently typeset lines.

This panel is extended only. IRIX never shipped a font panel, so there is no 1993 original to reproduce and there is no --canonical face. See Command Line and Keys for --core-only, which is a different thing.