title: Make Anaconda's tkinter aware of system fonts or install new fonts for Anaconda
body: <p>I have two Python installations on my Debian Sid notebook, ⑴ the system's Python (v.2.7) with a little bunch of utility packages (including <code>Tkinter</code>) and ⑵ Anaconda's Python 3.</p>
  
  <p>It is easy to see which (well, here how many...) fonts are available for the two Python distributions.</p>
  
  <p><em>Python 2</em></p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; from Tkinter import Tk
  &gt;&gt;&gt; from tkFont import families
  &gt;&gt;&gt; Tk(); available = families()   ### Tk() is needed to have a running tcl interpreter
  &lt;Tkinter.Tk instance at 0x7f977bcbfb90&gt;
  &gt;&gt;&gt; len(available)
  3011
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><em>Python 3</em></p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; from tkinter import Tk
  &gt;&gt;&gt; from tkinter.font import families
  &gt;&gt;&gt; Tk() ; available = families()
  &lt;tkinter.Tk object .&gt;
  &gt;&gt;&gt; len(available)
  68
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>It seems to me that Anaconda's <code>tkinter</code> only looks at the basic X fonts <strike>that came with the distribution</strike><sup>see edit below</sup>.</p>
  
  <p>Do you know a procedure to, alternatively</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>let Anaconda's <code>tkinter</code> know of the system fonts (preferred alternative) or</li>
  <li>install a few fonts in the Anaconda's tree so that <code>tkinter</code> can use them?</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>tia</p>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p><em>Edit</em> the fonts available to Anaconda are indeed system fonts, but only the fonts that are known to <code>xfontsel</code>, i.e., the fonts in the font path that can be manipulated using <code>xset</code>.</p>
  
  <p>I tried the following</p>
  
  <pre><code>$ cd ~/.fonts ; mkfontscale ; mkfontdir ; xset fp+ `pwd`
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and <code>xfontsel</code> showed about 30 more font families. Checking with Python 3 I verified that <em>only two</em> font families were added to the list of available fonts (namely <code>'go'</code> and <code>'gomono'</code> — no <code>'consolas'</code> etc) and producing a label</p>
  
  <pre><code>...
  r = Tk() ; Label(r, text="Go Mono", font=('gomono', 24)).pack()
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>with Python 2 and Python 3 succeeded in both cases, but Debian's Python showed a nice antialiased text while the other was a (rough) bitmap rendition.</p>
  
  <p>So, in a sense, I have partially answered my question, but</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>not every font family, as shown by <code>xfontsel</code>, was taken up by <code>tkinter</code></li>
  <li>even for the very few that were recognized, the rendition leaves too much to be desired...</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>and I'd like to read a better, more useful answer.</p>