[gentoo-user] Documentation of and utilities to manipulate console fonts?

[gentoo-user] Documentation of and utilities to manipulate console fonts?

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello, Gentoo.

Recently, in another software project, somebody wants to replace the
ASCII quoting characters ", `, ' with curly unicode quoting characters.
I'm not in favour of this, but I'll probably be losing the argument.

So I need a font which can display these characters.  Not an X-windows
GUI font, but a console font.  There doesn't seem to be a suitable one
in /usr/share/consolefonts, so I'll probably have to modify an existing
one to make a new one.

Relevant to the discussion is the program "setfont".  It's man page
describes in general terms what is contained in a font file like
/usr/share/consolefonts/lat1-16.psfu.gz, but not its exact format, nor
where to look to find this description.  I haven't found anything useful
in the kernel Documentation tree, yet.

This documentation must surely exist somewhere.  Does anybody here know
where?  Additionally, there must be utilities for manipulating these
fonts.  Does anybody here know what any of these utilities are called?

Many thanks for the help!

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).

Re: [gentoo-user] Documentation of and utilities to manipulate console fonts?

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello, again.

On Wed, Jun 03, 2015 at 03:40:17PM +0000, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> Hello, Gentoo.

> Recently, in another software project, somebody wants to replace the
> ASCII quoting characters ", `, ' with curly unicode quoting characters.
> I'm not in favour of this, but I'll probably be losing the argument.

> So I need a font which can display these characters.  Not an X-windows
> GUI font, but a console font.  There doesn't seem to be a suitable one
> in /usr/share/consolefonts, so I'll probably have to modify an existing
> one to make a new one.

> Relevant to the discussion is the program "setfont".  It's man page
> describes in general terms what is contained in a font file like
> /usr/share/consolefonts/lat1-16.psfu.gz, but not its exact format, nor
> where to look to find this description.  I haven't found anything useful
> in the kernel Documentation tree, yet.

> This documentation must surely exist somewhere.  Does anybody here know
> where?  Additionally, there must be utilities for manipulating these
> fonts.  Does anybody here know what any of these utilities are called?

> Many thanks for the help!

I've found media-gfx/psftools, which seems to do what I want.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).