The Oracle Solaris desktop environment uses the fontconfig library for configuring and customizing font access. fontconfig maintains a list of all fonts available on the system, using automatic discovery based on the configuration in fonts.conf(4) file. When an application is searching for a specific font by name, and optionally other attributes such as size, font-weight, or language, fontconfig provides the application with the specific font path. fontconfig does not lay out or render the fonts into text.
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 displays information about the default monospaced font for Japanese. (Monospaced fonts, also called fixed-width fonts, are typically used in computer terminals.)
$ 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 about fontconfig and its configuration, see the fonts.conf(4), fc-match(1), and fc-list(1) man pages, or the project page at https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/fontconfig/.