I’m currently using nix to manage some of my builds on my non-NixOS system (Gentoo). Though I’m interested in switching over eventually, I’m not currently able to. It works great, but I’m running into some font-based problems for nix-installed programs.
Programs that I install with nix don’t seem to be able to see any installed fonts: they either have only fonts bundled with them, or no fonts at all. I’ve found advice for how to handle fonts on a NixOS system, but not for how to give my own derivations access to fonts without the configuration.nix infrastructure. Just including the fonts in the buildDepends doesn’t work, as expected.
I would be happy either with bundling fonts into the nix environment, or with allowing my nix-installed programs to see the ordinary system fonts. A potential complication is that my system fontconfig is version 2.13.0, while nixpkgs-unstable seems to only have 2.12.6.
Any ideas how to go about this? The main problem I’m encountering at the moment is that generating graphs with ggplot2 in R cannot display any text, and every character is just a little box with a unicode codepoint. But I also have the same problem installing the standard firefox derivation: it just has a horrible-looking default font everywhere.