June 22, 2021 – 100 days to offload countdown #87

I use polybar as panel for herbstluftwm. The example polybar config expects the font Siji to be available. No matter what I did on my manjaro machines, the font, even if present, wouldn’t be found by polybar. fc-list confirmed that the font, although installed, wasn’t available.

After searching the net and finding references to other bitmap fonts not beeing loaded, and digging a bit into how the font-config system works, I found /etc/fonts/conf.d/70-no-bitmaps.conf and 75-yes-terminus.conf. So the system forbids non-scaling fonts per default and allows one bitmap font explicitly, namely Terminus. I’m fine with this, I’m sure the overall look and feel of the system is guaranteed to look sleek under all circumstances, unless you know what you are doing.

Install neosiji via AUR and put this file in place to allow siji to be loaded:

  <?xml version="1.0"?>
  <!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
  <fontconfig>
    <!-- Accept siji font -->
    <selectfont>
      <acceptfont>
        <pattern>
          <patelt name="family"><string>Siji</string></patelt>
        </pattern>
      </acceptfont>
    </selectfont>
  </fontconfig>

Then rebuild the font cache with fc-cache -r and the example configuration of polybar looks good, and the X11 error log isn’t chockfull of error messages by polybar complaining about unknown code-points.