I use FontExplorer X to manage fonts, and by default it maintains an additional directory of fonts outside of other standard font directories. This is no problem for most OS X applications, however X11 applications such as Inkscape use X11's font cache which does not check the FontExplorer X directory for fonts.

When running the font cache updating tool (font_cache), I noticed that it was searching in a directory that didn't exist, ~/.fonts; so, not wanting to figure out how to define which directories font_cache should be looking in, I created a symbolic link from FontExplorer X's library to ~/.fonts:

ln -s FontExplorer\ X/Font\ Library/ .fonts

And then forced font_cache to run and recompile all fonts from the X11 Terminal application:

font_cache -v -f

This did the trick, and now all my fonts show up in Inkscape. I had also attempted previously to create a symlink in a directory that font_cache was checking already, but with no success-- it looks like font_cache will not traverse through symlinked directories, if they occur in a directory it checks (e.g., ~/Library/Fonts/fontexplorer_x_symlink); but it will look in a directory that is a symlink (e.g., ~/.fonts/).

Hopefully anyone googling for a similar issue will find this, but what other ways could one get font_cache to look in other directories? I couldn't find much, but then again I didn't really search all that much either. ;)

Posted by:

Ryan