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Background

I'm using Firefox 67.0.4 on the traditional Chinese version of a daily build of Ubuntu 19.10 (Eoan) and for every website (e.g., Axios and Slashdot) that falls back to the CSS serif keyword—often because the author(s) only specified Windows‐only fonts such as Georgia—I'm seeing the ugly AR PL UMing TW fallback font.

I've tried configuring Firefox's font settings such that the fallback font for serif text in the Latin script falls back to the Liberation Serif font. Unfortunately, this setting seems to be broken and doesn't do anything.

Based on the comments at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1547743, I executed the fc-match serif command, which returns a reference to the offending font as I expected:

uming.ttc: "AR PL UMing TW" "Light"

I believe that changing this value is key to manually fixing this issue without changing the operating system language to English.

Question

So my question is: "How do I configure the result of the fontconfig command fc-match serif?" Despite the documentation I've read, I still can't figure out how to do it.

The best idea I can come up with is to put the following code in a new global configuration file named local.conf located at /etc/fonts/:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
    <alias>
        <family>serif</family>
        <prefer><family>Liberation Sans</family></prefer> 
    </alias>
</fontconfig>

Of course, this doesn't work.

I also can't figure out anything definitive about (A) where the local user configuration file is supposed to be placed other than somewhere nested within the user's $HOME directory, (B) what the local configuration file is supposed to be named, and (C) the minimum requirements of what the local configuration file should contain.

With regard to (A), apparently, it was historically placed in the ~/.fonts folder, but the comment in the /etc/fonts/fonts.conf file indicates that use of this directory is deprecated.

1 Answer 1

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You can remove the symlink to /etc/fonts/conf.avail/64-arphic-uming.conf, which is the cause of it:

sudo rm /etc/fonts/conf.d/64-arphic-uming.conf

Or if you don't like UMing, why not simply remove the whole package:

sudo apt purge fonts-arphic-uming

Extra comments:
What you noticed is not good. Ubuntu ships the fonts-arphic-uming package by default for Chinese users, but since Ubuntu 18.04 the intention is that Noto Serif CJK {SC,TC} shall be the default font for Chinese serif. Due to the aggressive configuration in that file, it doesn't work as intended.

I'm going to fix that. Thanks for calling my attention to it!

Edit:

About to be fixed in eoan: https://launchpad.net/bugs/1834561

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  • Thank you! I executed your suggested rm command and fc-match serif immediately began returning NotoSerifCJK-Regular.ttc: "Noto Serif CJK TC" "Regular". This also immediately fixed the font issue in Firefox with no restart of the program being necessary. Thanks for fixing the Ubuntu bug too. Jun 28, 2019 at 19:26

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