[gentoo-user] Re: "6x13" font for gnome-terminal

[James Cloos <cloos@jhcloos.com>]

>>>>> "Allan" == Allan Gottlieb <gottlieb@nyu.edu> writes:

Allan> ... I use what [the] 6x13 [bdf] font.
Allan> Its [xlfd] name is
Allan> -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-SemiCondensed--13-120-75-75-C-60-ISO8859-1

Allan> Is there some way I can tell gnome-terminal to use
Allan> -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-SemiCondensed--13-120-75-75-C-60-ISO8859-1

Yes, xft supports bitmap fonts and this one should be in the list.

It can be a bit of work to get the right fontconfig name for a given
xlfd name, so the best thing to do is to find the fonts.dir file that
matches the xlfd to a filename, and find that same filename in the
fonts.cache-1 file in that directory.

The font you want is in /usr/share/fonts/misc/6x13-ISO8859-1.pcf.gz
and that matches this line in /usr/share/fonts/misc/fonts-cache-1:

,----
| "6x13-ISO8859-1.pcf.gz" 0 "Fixed-12:style=SemiCondensed:slant=0:
|  weight=100:width=87:pixelsize=13:spacing=110:foundry=Misc:
|  antialias=False:index=0:outline=False:scalable=False:dpi=75:
|  charset= |>^1!|>^1!|>^1!P0oWQ |>^1!|>^1!|>^1!:
|  lang=aa|...long-list...|zu:
|  fontversion=0:fontformat=PCF"
`----

I've manually broken that to fit in 80 cols, and elided the full list
of the lang attribute.

This means that the string from Fixed to PCF is the full fontconfig
name.  In practice you can leave out a lot of that.  This should let
you view the font:

:; xfd -fa 'Fixed-12:style=semicondensed:pixelsize=13:foundry=misc'

the equivalent invocation for that font as a server-side font is:

:; xfd -fn -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-SemiCondensed--13-120-75-75-C-60-ISO8859-1

To get gnome-terminal to use that font you may need to manually edit
the gconf file.  I'd first make a named profile in gnome-terminal's
edit current profile dialog (from the right-click menu), and then
look for that profile's name in:

~/.gconf/apps/gnome-terminal/profiles/

The default profile is named Default, and its gconf file is:

~/.gconf/apps/gnome-terminal/profiles/Default/%gconf.xml

In that file, look for:

   <entry name="font"

and put the fontconfig name in the <stringvalue> container w/in that
entry.

There is also an x_font entry that appears to take an xlfd, so I'd
change that, too.

Depending on your dpi setting, you might even get lucky by using g-t's
dialog to choose Fixed, style=semicondensed and one of the offered
point sizes.  On my 133dpi screen -- with X actually using that dpi --
I was unable to get the dialog to match 6x13.

As an alternative, you can try Vera Mono or DevaVu Mono; they have
about the same aspect ratio as the bdf fixed fonts and look as good
if you have freetype installed w/o bindist in USE.  Ie, when using
the bycode interpreter, the hinting leaves the stems sharp and adds
just a hint of smoothing to the curves and diagonals.  It looks
especially sweet on an LCD w/ fontconfig setup w/ rgba.

-JimC
-- 
James H. Cloos, Jr. <cloos@jhcloos.com> <http://jhcloos.com>
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