Bitmap fonts are disabled by default

[Björn Lindqvist]

By default, fontconfig-config installs a file called "/etc/fonts/conf.d/70-no-bitmaps.conf". It disables bitmap fonts. What good for, I don't know. Though if you later install a bitmap font "apt-get install xfonts-terminus" then that font wont show up in menus. That is not what you expect. The workaround is:

sudo rm /etc/fonts/conf.d/70-no-bitmaps.conf
sudo ln -s /etc/fonts/conf.avail/70-yes-bitmaps.conf /etc/fonts/conf.d/70-yes-bitmaps.conf

But you shouldn't need that and bitmap founds shouldn't be disabled.

The bug is present in Ubuntu wily, 15.10.

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

Yes, this is intentional.

See /usr/share/doc/fontconfig/README.Debian for instructions on how to enable bitmap fonts. I copied the instructions below.
---------

If you wish to enable bitmapped fonts manually, remove the
/etc/fonts/conf.d/70-no-bitmaps.conf symbolic link and add a symlink named
70-yes-bitmaps.conf pointing to ../conf.avail/70-yes-bitmaps.conf:

  cd /etc/fonts/conf.d && \
    rm -f 70-no-bitmaps.conf && \
    ln -s ../conf.avail/70-yes-bitmaps.conf

[Björn Lindqvist (bjourne)]

Jeremy, I know that the behaviour is intentional but it is still dumb. As I wrote, there is no good reason to disable bitmap fonts.