Location of truetype fonts

Question

I would like to create a small script that installs a few truetype fonts on the user's system. On my Ubuntu machine the truetype fonts are located at /usr/share/fonts/truetype. However, I'm not sure if this location is the same on all machines. Is there a way to find out where truetypes fonts are stored on any Linux system?

Update
After some research I found that the path usr/share/fonts/truetype is specified in the XML file /etc/fonts/fonts.conf. It's an XML file, so I can use XPath to get the dir:

xpath -q -e 'fontconfig/dir[1]/text()[1]' /etc/fonts/fonts.conf

I don't know however if this file will exist on all (or most) Linux systems.

Answer 1

Maybe you could consider creating a package with your fonts. It is a bit of work creating the package description files, and creation rules. But you gain ability to update and uninstall for free. For Ubuntu, you should create .deb files.

Answer 2

All distributions are differents, you're better to set a default path and let the user select between the default and a custom one.

Edit:

In my opinion, you have three solutions because there is no environment variable or function for that.

1. Set a default path and let the user select between the default and a custom one.
2. Like dtrosset said, you could create packages with your fonts for the different distributions.
3. You could use if/elif/else and test -e to determine if the different font server paths exist. If no one exist, show the default path and let the user select between it and a custom one.

Ex:

DEFAULT="$home/.fonts/"
UBUNTU_XFSTT="/usr/share/fonts/truetype/"
RHL52_XFS="/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/ttfonts/"
RHL6_XFSTT="/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/"
DEBIAN_XFSTT="/usr/share/fonts/truetype/"

#Test if directory exist
if test -e ${UBUNTU_XFSTT} ; then
    echo ${UBUNTU_XFSTT}
elif test -e ${RHL52_XFS} ; then
    echo ${RHL52_XFS}
elif test -e ${RHL6_XFSTT} ; then
    echo ${RHL6_XFSTT}
elif test -e ${DEBIAN_XFSTT} ; then
    echo ${DEBIAN_XFSTT}
else
    echo ${DEFAULT}
fi

P.S. That's only MY opinion...