X.org missing fonts

Question

I have a font installed (7x14, part of the xorg-fonts-miscbitmaps package), which I would like to use in my xterm. Problem is, X won't let me.

X seems to pick up the font dir:

# grep -A 3 FontPath /var/log/Xorg.0.log
(==) FontPath set to:
/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/misc/,
/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/TTF/,
/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/OTF

... but it doesn't show up inside X:

# xlsfonts | egrep "[0-9]+x[0-9]"
6x13

The /usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/misc folder contains a bunch of NxM-*.pcf.gz files, for various values of N and M. Only the 6x13 one seems to be useable, though.

How do I make the rest of the misc-fonts available?

Answer 1

When you install a bitmap font, you need to run mkfontdir to register the font in the fonts.dir file. (This isn't specific to FreeBSD.) I would expect the package installation script to take care of that, but maybe this package didn't do it.

As a user who has permission to write to /usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/misc/, run mkfontdir /usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/misc/. Then tell your running X instance to reread the font list with xset fp rehash.