This is about using TTFs in xterms to display accented letters, cyrillic, and even scripts. I thought I knew most of what was needed, but this week I've realised my knowledge is a bit flakey.
So far I've established: A. an individual xterm can be launched with -fa DejaVuSansMono or even -fa FreeMono:size=10:charwidth=9 (that makes freemono less excessively spaced out, but it's still quite hard to read). B. With enough "magic" in .Xresources, an xterm will know it has to use a TTF. BUT, it searches for the first available font and uses that - I had erroneously believed the faceName resource would select the font. I discovered this because my recent systems had omitted my local.conf file, and also didn't use the BLFS sed to force DejaVu instead of Bitstream Vera. I wasn't building Bitstream Vera because I intended to use DejaVu, but what I got was the first available mono font in fonts.conf, in my case Luxi Mono (looks nice for what it provides, but misses a few accented letters I now care about). My "magic" in .Xresources seems to be *VT100*locale: UTF-8 *VT100*faceName: "FreeMono" *VT100*faceSize: 12 (I suppose I could be overlooking another entry) Yes, I changed it back to FreeMono, but I'm still seeing DejaVu. So, the questions: 1. The faceSize seems to be used, but is this enough in itself to make xterm use a TTF ? If not, what is/are the other key value(s) ? 2. Anybody know how to write a resource to force the specified font, with size and charwidth ? (e.g. so that my xterms suddenly use FreeMono with size 10 and charwidth 9). 3. Is there any way to use "best fit" for TT fonts in an xterm, or in a replacement for xterm ? I've proved that konsole doesn't do this by default but I haven't tested gnome-terminal, ideally I'd prefer something with fewer dependencies. One of my test documents is 'quickbrown.txt' from the ucs-fonts package (which _doesn't_ provide TTFs). With DejaVu I can see the Latin and Cyrillic, with FreeMono I can see the hebrew, but none of my fonts seem to work correctly on the Japanese or Thai examples. A few fonts almost look correct in the Japanese text, but on looking closer I see spurious latin characters among the script - this might be because the fonts aren't really Mono, I _think_ the problem persists on my system with ncursesw. URI for quickbrown.txt is http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/examples/quickbrown.txt and it does all render correctly in firefox and konqueror with my current fonts. Ken -- das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
