It is not hard to see why Microsoft has been "all-in" on
trying to get control of Linux recently.
Little known gems like fc-match are few and far between in the buggy operating system that Microsoft actually charges money for.
fc-match (a.free.utility.) tells you information about fonts.
If you simply type fc-match in a terminal, it reports the font in use AND the fall-back fonts to use if the main one has a problem later.
$ fc-match
DejaVuSans.ttf: "DejaVu Sans" "Book"
$ fc-match serif will tell you the font used for serif,
and fc-match -s serif will tell you fallback fonts,
in order of best match.
$ fc-match sans
DejaVuSans.ttf: "DejaVu Sans" "Book"
$
$ fc-match serif
DejaVuSerif.ttf: "DejaVu Serif" "Book"
$
$ fc-match condensed
DejaVuSans.ttf: "DejaVu Sans" "Book"
$
$ fc-match monospace
DejaVuSansMono.ttf: "DejaVu Sans Mono" "Book"
$
Want to find a thin, sans-serif font on your system?
Try a related utility, fc-list:
$ fc-list | grep -i sans | grep -i thin | wc
which passes the full list of fonts to the first grep, which looks for anything named "sans". This is passed to the next grep to look for "thin" "sans" fonts; which is all passed to wc, a line counter. wc reports 127 thin sans fonts.
$ fc-list | grep -i sans | grep -i thin | wc
127 1133 17819
$ fc-match -b Arial
Pattern has 35 elts (size 48)
family: "Arimo"(s)
familylang: "en"(s)
style: "Regular"(s)
stylelang: "en"(s)
fullname: "Arimo"(s)
fullnamelang: "en"(s)
slant: 0(i)(s)
weight: 80(f)(s)
width: 100(f)(s)
size: 12(f)(s)
pixelsize: 12.5(f)(s)
foundry: "GOOG"(w)
hintstyle: 1(i)(w)
hinting: True(s)
verticallayout: False(s)
autohint: False(s)
globaladvance: True(s)
file: "/usr/share/fonts/truetype/croscore/Arimo-Regular.ttf"(w)
index: 0(i)(w)
outline: True(w)
scalable: True(w)
dpi: 75(f)(s)
scale: 1(f)(s)
fontversion: 86508(i)(s)
capability: "otlayout:cyrl otlayout:grek otlayout:hebr otlayout:latn"(w)
fontformat: "TrueType"(w)
embeddedbitmap: True(s)
decorative: False(s)
lcdfilter: 1(i)(w)
namelang: "en"(s)
prgname: "fc-match"(s)
postscriptname: "Arimo"(w)
color: False(w)
symbol: False(s)
variable: False(s)
... and that's not all!
See also:
fc-list - List your available fonts
and the wealth of data in your local fontconfig user's guide (HTML):
file:///usr/share/doc/fontconfig/fontconfig-user.html