Hi John!

···<date: 2013-07-26, Friday>···<from: john Culleton>···

> I am tryihg to follow the wiki on "Fonts in Luatex." It suggests the
> following statement for Linux systems:
> 
> export OSFONTDIR="/usr/local/share/fonts;$HOME/.fonts"
> 
> But I store my fonts in /usr/share/fonts so I used:
> 
> export OSFONTDIR="/usr/share/fonts"
> 
> The net effect of this statement was to wipe out all my text fonts used
> with XFCE4 or KDE, at least when I use my regular user signon.  I
> examined my /etc/profile, $HOME/.profile, @HOME/.bashrc files and
> deleted or commented out all references to OSFONTDIR. I still have no
> gui fonts. 

Can you clarify what you mean by “wipe out”? Were the font files
deleted? Are other kinds of fonts (e.g. bitmap/pfb) still
working?

> If anyone has any suggestions on how I can revive my gui fonts that
> would be welcome. Only my regular user signon is affected, But I
> really want to know what kind of OSFONTDIR statement I can use that
> won't wipe out my gui fonts. 

OSFONTDIR is a tex specific (kpathsea and Context) variable that
I don’t think is used by the system (fontconfig, desktop
environment). While you were fiddling with font paths, is it
possible that you accidentally modified something else, like
~/.config/fontconfig or /etc/fonts/* ?

Best regards,
Philipp