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2.4 Font Directories

groff enforces few restrictions on how font description files are named. For its family/style mechanism to work (see Font Families), the names of fonts within a family should start with the family name, followed by the style. For example, the Times family uses ‘T’ for the family name and ‘R’, ‘B’, ‘I’, and ‘BI’ to indicate the styles ‘roman’, ‘bold’, ‘italic’, and ‘bold italic’, respectively. Thus the final font names are ‘TR’, ‘TB’, ‘TI’, and ‘TBI’.

Font description files are kept in font directories, which together constitute the font path. The search procedure always appends the directory devname, where name is the name of the output device. Assuming TeX DVI output, and /foo/bar as a font directory, the font description files for grodvi must be in /foo/bar/devdvi. Each directory in the font path is searched in the following order until the desired font description file is found or the list is exhausted.

• Directories specified with GNU troff’s or groff’s -f command-line option. All output drivers (and some preprocessors) support this option as well, because they require information about the glyphs to be rendered in the document.
• Directories listed in the GROFF_FONT_PATH environment variable.
• A site-local directory and the main font description directory. The locations corresponding to your installation are listed in section “Environment” of gtroff(1). If not otherwise configured, they are as follows.

  /usr/local/share/groff/site-font
  /usr/local/share/groff/1.23.0/font
  

  The foregoing assumes that the version of groff is 1.23.0, and that the installation prefix was /usr/local. It is possible to fine-tune these locations during the source configuration process.