Sounds like the font files themselves in that folder were system links  so the fonts actually live elsewhere. In general, you do *not* want to change the folder structure outside of your /usr/home/USERNAME folder since the package management & OS rely on it.

I’d start by fining which package installs the font and creates the symlinks and then force install it. For Debian-based distros, I often use the Ubuntu package search to see which package contains the files I’m looking for. In this case, it looks like “font-dejavu-core”: http://packages.ubuntu.com/wily/all/fonts-dejavu-core/filelist

If the font is back, then the issues related to GEM looking in the wrong path could be fixed via IOHannes or some GEM dev updating/making a new font search path to GEM. In the meantime, you can do a quick and dirty fix by making a symlink from the new font dir to the one GEM is looking for:

sudo ln -s  /usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/ /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-dejavu/

This way you will have both folders & one of them is just a link to the other.

--------
Dan Wilcox
@danomatika
danomatika.com

On Feb 24, 2016, at 4:00 AM, pd-list-request@lists.iem.at wrote:

From: Alexandros Drymonitis <adrcki@gmail.com>
Subject: [PD] Messed font files
Date: February 24, 2016 at 3:14:36 AM MST


This problem doesn't concern Pd only, but it started through Pd (well, I started it) and it is related to Pd, so I'm posting it here.
I've recently dual booted my laptop with Debian Jessie XFCE and in general all is working fine. While doing some stuff in Pd (that's 0.46.2 from the Jessie repositories) I created a [text2d] and got this error message:
[text2d]: cannot find font-file '/usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-dejavu/DejaVuSans.ttf'

So I looked in /usr/share/fonts/truetype and saw there was a dejavu/ directory, which had some font files in it, including DejavuSans.ttf. Now, not being very linux-savvy, I changed the name of the directory to ttf-dejavu/. [text2d] worked fine, but ever since, when I open Pd, I get this message:
WARNING: Font family 'DejaVu Sans Mono' not found, using default (Courier 10 Pitch)

I tried to rename the directory back to dejavu/, but now the corresponding font file is a "broken symbolic link to ../dejavu/DejaVuSansMono.ttf"

Renaming the directory back to ttf-dejavu/ doesn't work for [text2d] either.
It's a bit annoying because Pd's font is now quite small, and even if I include the -font-size-12 flag in the Startup flags, if I open an existing patch, the font goes back to 10, and the letters are quite small. I now realize that this wasn't a very smart thing to do, but I did it...
All this might make sense to people who know the Linux system well, but that's not the case with me and I'm experimenting. So, anyone knows a solution to this? It would be nice if I could solve both  problems, Pd not finding DejavuSansMono.ttf and [text2d] not finding DejavuSans.ttf

Thanks