Mapnik - The Missing Manual

3.5. FontSet

A <FontSet> contains a list of or more <Font> entries that are searched in the listed order when rendering characters. This way a style sheet can specify multiple alternative fonts for different platforms, or different language specific fonts.

Listed fonts that are not found on the system runnng Mapnik are simply ignored after generating a warning. Also when a certain character is not found in the first font the other fonts are searched in order until one supporting the character is found.

Note

Note that by default Mapnik only looks for fonts under one pre-configured directory and it’s subdirectories, e.g. /usr/share/fonts/. To also find fonts uder other paths, you either need to add a font-directory=… attribute to your <Map> tag, or register additionl font directories programmatically in your mapnik application before processing a stylesheet.

So when e.g. a map is to show both <TextSymbolizer> or <ShieldSymbolizer> using the fontset_name attribute.

Table 20. FontSet attributes
Attribute	Value	Default	Description
`name`	string	"<missing name>"

Example 12. FontSet definition

  <FontSet name="my-fonts">
    <Font face-name="Noto Sans Regular"/>
    <Font face-name="Noto Sans CJK JP Regular"/>
  </FontSet>