bitmap fonts option> no, it wasn't. I've turned it on, and 'fixed' does now appear in the list of available fonts. (So I suppose the original problem could be considered user error. As it happens I didn't do the original install on this machine.)
However, gnome-terminal still doesn't seem to be handling it correctly. This is a bitmap font, so it should only be offered at the "right" size (which happens to be 10 for 'fixed'), whereas gnome-terminal still allows you to set a size (and presumably scales the font) and gives no indication of what the natural size of the font is. Compare emacs, which gets this right -- the shift-right-click font menu just offers 'fixed' rather than any scaling options. I know that the fontconfig stuff is because it's really aimed at fully scalable truetype fonts for applications which want to display usually proportional text at the user's choice of font and size. But gnome- terminal isn't really that kind of application -- it's a terminal, and it needs a fixed-width font -- so using a standard font setup and font selection dialog is arguably the wrong thing. For example, the dialog lets you pick a non-fixed-width font (try 'Free Sans medium 10' and watch the display get messed up whenever there's an "m") -- it should probably not display proportional fonts at all (or if it must, behind some kind of 'experts only' checkbox). So I suppose that's really what I'm complaining about -- gnome-terminal is trying to use a generic font selection system which is relatively poorly suited to a program displaying straightforward fixed-width text (so it lets you select totally unsuitable fonts and doesn't necessarily display fonts which are ideal for the terminal but which might be disabled in the system wide config because they don't make sense in the general case.) -- 'fixed' font doesn't seem to appear in gnome-terminal's font list https://launchpad.net/bugs/52476 -- desktop-bugs mailing list desktop-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/desktop-bugs
