People who wish to be able to read a wider range of languages on the console (e.g. on servers, or while waiting for a build of xorg to finish) might be interested in this. It's a series of 8x16 psfu fonts created from a bdf font.
The method follows Dmitry Bolkovityanov's uni_vga (indeed, it uses his perl script) but the base font started out as etl16. I first modified that to use a main format of 3 lines above the capital letters, 10 lines for capitals, and 3 lines for descenders. Needing a new name for it, I noted that U+03A3 is 'Σ' and called it sigma-consolefonts. After a limited initial prerelease it is now ready for its 0.1 release. The homepage is http://homepage.ntlworld.com/zarniwhoop/consolefonts/sigma.html and there is a backup copy of the tarball at http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/~ken/fonts/sigma-consolefonts/ My main focus is on legibility, followed by coverage of current languages. These fonts are only really concerned with alphabetic scripts, and the armenian and georgian letters (plus arabic and hebrew) are probably unchanged from etl16. Many of the latin, cyrillic, and greek letters have had their forms changed. Like Dmitry, but unlike most console fonts, I include the bdf file (the source, as it were) and map files. So, you can alter any letter forms which offend you, or produce your own map with a different combination of glyphs. (Patches welcomed if you find errors.) Although there are some 256-glyph files, I prefer 512-glyph at the expense of losing bright colours. As with the fonts used in X, I map latin/cyrillic/greek to the same letter where appropriate (so, they all use the same form for 'A', unlike e.g. LatArCyrHeb. This not only looks better to me, it means I have more space to add other languages. For most people, I will recommend my 'general' map - this should cover all current latin-based alphabets (except some african and vietnamese), together with the major cyrillic languages and current greek. There are other variations to cover african (not tremendously useful if your language of interest needs combining diacriticals, but hopefully ok for e.g. venda), vietnamese (proof of concept - coverage is similar to viscii), polytonic greek, and a few others. The package includes a number of example files listing the alphabets, or at least the selection of characters, which I believe are used in various languages - these may be useful if you wish to establish the coverage of your TrueType fonts in X. The build dependencies are gzip, install, make, and perl. Tested on linuxfromscratch, cross-lfs (with UTF-8 modifications, e.g. for ncursesw), and debian etch. This will be on freshmeat when it passes their project-validation process. Thank you for taking the time to read this. ĸen -- das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
