Not having to see Ghostscript’s fonts

2025/03/21

In ~/.config/fontconfig/conf.d/70-no-urw-base35.conf:

<fontconfig>
  <selectfont>
    <rejectfont>
      <glob>/usr/share/fonts/X11/Type1/*</glob>
      <glob>/usr/share/fonts/opentype/urw-base35/*</glob>
      <glob>/usr/share/fonts/type1/urw-base35/*</glob>
    </rejectfont>
  </selectfont>
</fontconfig>

Because. They … I don’t know. They look like this.

This is a screenshot of example.com with the font changed. Which might not be the most proper way to render a type specimen, but at least it was easy. This is Nimbus Mono PS with the body text at 12px.

This is Nimbus Roman.

This is Nimbus Sans.

Do they have too much uh… Anyway, it’s a personal preference.

Why are they even installed

I have Ghostscript installed, which a survey reports is normal. As a consequence, I have its free fonts installed too. That, too, seems to be normal–by a hair.

Asking Debian’s APT to remove the package, fonts-urw-base35 causes ghostscript to be removed too. Which why do I have Ghostscript in the first place? Apparently it’s recommended by ImageMagick, which is recommended by… a barcode scanner, and that’s a dependency of gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad. And I want to be able to change my desktop wallpaper, so yeah.

Who even asks for these fonts

Some of these fonts, such as Nimbus Mono PS, Nimbus Roman, and Nimbus Sans, show up pretty often. If a website uses CSS such as this:

code {
  font-family: Courier, monospace;
}

Nimbus Mono PS gets matched for being metric compatible with Courier, even though the site might not particularly desire metric compatibility. Similarly, Nimbus Roman shows up when Times is specified; Nimbus Sans for Helvetica.

Having them installed but ignoring them

Anyway, most of my stuff uses fontconfig to determine that e.g. Nimbus Mono PS is a good substitute for Courier, and there’s a way to tell fontconfig to ignore these fonts. With no thanks to the documentation which is very unspecific about how to use <rejectfont>.

My last post was about either Emoji metrics or The 3% of everything in the US didn’t actually happen. Find out which.