XFree86 comes with extensive documentation in the form of manual
pages and typeset documents. Before installing fonts, you really
should read the mkfontdir
(1) manual page; other manual pages of
interest include X
(1), Xserver
(1), xset
(1),
xlsfonts
(1) and showfont
(1). In addition, you may want to
read the X Logical Font Description document, by Jim Flowers, which is
provided in the file `xc/doc/xlfd.PS.Z
'.
The comp.fonts FAQ, which is unfortunately no longer being maintained, contains a wealth of information about digital fonts.
The
xfsft home page
has been superseded by this document, and is now obsolete; you may
however still find some of the information it contains useful. Joerg Pommnitz' xfsft page is the
canonical source for the `ttmkfdir
' utility.
The documentation of X-TrueType is available from the X-TrueType home page.
A number of East-Asian CIDFonts are available from O'Reilly's FTP site.
The Unicode consortium site may be of interest. But you are more likely to find what you need on Markus Kuhn's UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ.
The IANA RFC documents, available from a number of sites throughout the world, often provide interesting information about character set issues; my favourite is RFC 373.