Space Station Lambda

Over the last months I had a problem when browsing sites using the YUI font library. Those sites would have a hard to read monospaced font instead of a variable-width sans-serif one.

Today I decided to find out what was the culprit of this. I started Firebug and inspected the offending CSS. It turned out that they mention the font name clean in their font-family path, and that removing this from the valid families helped restore order among the glyphs. To make this permanent I had to find the offending font and delete it.

xlsfonts | grep -i clean

told me that the subject was “Schumacher Clean”, but not more. After messing around with Fontmatrix (which doesn’t attempt to find the fonts registered with the X server by itself) and GNOME Specimen (which didn’t knew about or refused to tell me the location of a font’s files), this helped:

fc-cat | grep -i clean
# showed something like clR6x12.pcf.gz
locate clR6x12.pcf.gz
# gave me the location
sudo rm /usr/share/fonts/misc/clR*
# removed all incarnations of the font
sudo fc-cache
# informed the X server

Once again command-line tools proved to be the solution. Great for me, but quite problematic in a world where more than 99% of users don’t use it (because they don’t know what it is or how to use it productively).

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