For people who use UTF-8 in the system console, and dislike the fonts shipped in kbd-1.12 (e.g. no euro € symbol, or ugly cyrillic capitals quite unlike the corresponding latin letters, or just suffering from insufficient coverage), may I announce the first public release candidate of what I am calling sigma-consolefonts.
At http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/~ken/fonts/sigma-consolefonts/ in the file sigma-consolefonts-0.01rc0.tar.bz2. This started out as the etl16 font (in debian), but I've altered the position of the 'baseline' to get better descenders, and made various other changes. For most people, I recommend a 512-character map, but I've also included a few 256-character maps for those who demand the use of bright colours. Most of my maps cover the main cyrillic letters, greek, esperanto with a choice of other languages according to what seemed likely (so, a caucasian map, vietnamese, and the beginnings of an african map). Compared to the fonts in 'kbd' you may need to increase the brightness of your monitor. Even if you are happy with your current console font, or you spend your computing life in X, you may find the example-data useful: I've attempted to list all current alphabets (to the extent that unicode permits) for languages that might fit onto a console, together with a selection of other symbols commonly encountered. Comments welcome, but please direct them to me, discussing the intricacies of character shapes and what to map is a little bit esoteric for most people on this list. Thanks. I'm particularly interested in what doesn't get mapped, e.g. last week I discovered that the bulgarian manpage for makewhatis (man-1.6e) used an acute accent as a quote - that is now fixed, but there will be other idiosyncracies somewhere. I've also put my British keymap into the fonts/other directory (although at the moment quantum seems to be having difficulty serving it to me). This remaps the '\|' key (to left of spacebar) to AltGr\ and AltGr| as in xorg for when a PS/2 keyboard gets connected via a (kvm and) usb input (otherwise that one key doesn't work), adds latin1 dead keys and allows compose (using the menu key at the right) and AltGr for some of what you get in a normal map in xorg. Also allows input-by-heaxcode e.g. Ĉ is ctrl-shift-108. Might be useful as example if you need other things from your keymap. ĸen -- das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
