Sometimes the default fonts in a specific locale are not satisfactory. You can alter the font priorities by modifying the fontconfig configuration files in the /etc/fonts. fontconfig directory. System-wide configuration is modularized into individual xml files in the /etc/fonts/conf.avail directory. The /etc/fonts/conf.d directory then includes symbolic links to selected configuration files in the /etc/fonts/conf.avail directory. You can alter the system-wide configuration by adding or removing these symbolic links.
Use the fc-match(1) and fc-list(1) commands to obtain information about the default font and other available fonts. For example, the following command will display information about the default monospaced font for Japanese. (Monospaced fonts, also called fixed-width fonts, are typically used in text editors.)
$ fc-match Monospace:lang=ja ipag.otf: "IPAGothic" "Regular"
You might want to disable the use of bitmap fonts when alternative TrueType fonts are available and preferred, create a symbolic link to the configuration file 70-no-bitmaps.conf, as shown in the following example:
# cd /etc/fonts/conf.d # ln -s ../conf.avail/70-no-bitmaps.conf
fontconfig monitors the configuration directory /etc/fonts/conf.d and will automatically adjust its in-memory configuration to include the changes. For more information, see the fc-cache(1) man page. Per-user configuration can also be maintained in $HOME/.fonts.conf for each user. $HOME/.fonts is scanned for users' custom font files. For more information on fontconfig and its configuration, see the fonts.conf(4), fc-match(1), and fc-list(1) man pages, or the project page at http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/fontconfig.