Per user fonts.conf file

Question

In Kubuntu 12.04 using man fonts.conf i read:

 ~/.fonts.conf is the conventional location for per-user font configuration,
 although the actual location is specified in the global fonts.conf file.

But in /etc/fonts/fonts.conf i cannot find any settings giving me that local conf file path.

I am asking this, because in 12.10 the same command give me:

reading configurations from ~/.fonts.conf is deprecated

So i want to read user font conf file location from the global conf file.

Answer 1

It should work just fine. The system-wide file that causes your per-user configuration lives in /etc/fonts/conf.d/50-user.conf (actually it's a symlink to a file in conf.avail, but it's its presence in conf.d that makes it work here). Do you have that file?

If you're using 12.10, you'll see in it that the ~/.fonts.conf* locations are deprecated, meaning that support for them will be removed in a future version, so you shouldn't put your configuration there. Put it in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/fontconfig/fonts.conf instead. On Ubuntu by default $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is ~/.config, so if you haven't changed this (which you probably haven't) the location for you to put your per-user customisation is ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf.

When using 12.04, however, ~/.fonts.conf is the right location as you'll see that 50-user.conf doesn't have the other entries there. You should try to remember to move your configuration to the new location if you upgrade to 12.10, but it should still keep working for this release at least.

Give it a go and let me know how you get on.