Font [LWN.net]

Font

Posted Jun 4, 2004 21:24 UTC (Fri) by corbet (editor, #1)
In reply to: The Grumpy Editor's guide to terminal emulators by zutman
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to terminal emulators

"Must be lucidatypewriter. The best monospace font ever."

Nope, it's:

-adobe-courier-medium-r-normal--12-120-75-75-m-70-iso8859-1

I've probably been using it for ten years at least. Just tried force-feeding it to gnome-terminal via gconf-editor, but that led to little joy...oh well.

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Font

Posted Jun 4, 2004 21:36 UTC (Fri) by zutman (guest, #5077) [Link] (7 responses)

Nope, it's:

-adobe-courier-medium-r-normal--12-120-75-75-m-70-iso8859-1

Old habits never die. Here is a sample of lucida typewriter:

xterm -fg '#f0f0c0' +sb -bg '#050510' -fn lucidasanstypewriter-12

Font

Posted Jun 4, 2004 21:39 UTC (Fri) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (3 responses)

That one's not bad. Interestingly, you can get it in gnome-terminal, but you have to ask for nine-point to get the same size...

Font

Posted Jun 4, 2004 21:48 UTC (Fri) by zutman (guest, #5077) [Link] (2 responses)

Nine points is the one indeed, when you select it the normal
Gnome/KDE way.

That' still something that beriddles me about X font names.
What's that '12' doing in the name? Twelfth version? No, I don't
want to know, I'm grumpy too.

(But the LT makes me lyrical.)

Font

Posted Jun 4, 2004 22:05 UTC (Fri) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link]

I've never liked serif fonts like courier for technical uses like terminals or source editors. The serifs make things too hard to read (of course one reason could be my screen is 1600x1400 and my font sizes are none too big :-O :-)).

Lucidasans is not too bad, but I can't find a good readable version: 9 is too small, 10 is better but the fonts are vertically large which means I can't fit my 3 rows of xterms anymore, and 12 is far too big all around.

For my terminals I use that old standby, "8x13". Simple, clean, and doesn't take a lot of space.

BTW, the 12 is the pixel size. I'm not sure why the font selector has both a pixel size (12) and a point size (120). Maybe it's easier to pick by pixel size for bitmapped fonts or something.

Font

Posted Jun 4, 2004 22:08 UTC (Fri) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

That's the pixel size, which is useful for internal purposes, since the program will position the text in pixels (like all of the graphics primitives). Point size is given by multiplying by the resx (or resy) and dividing by 100.

Font

Posted Jun 5, 2004 0:04 UTC (Sat) by maniax (subscriber, #4509) [Link] (1 responses)

Looking at the examples you mention, I can't understand how can you stand them :) Here's what I use almost exclusively (I also use mlterm, if i have to edin something remotely in UTF8):

aterm -bg black -fg grey -cr white -tr +sb -sl 2048 -font -cronyx-fixed-bold-r-normal-*-14-130-75-75-c-70-microsoft-cp1251

Large font

Posted Jun 7, 2004 17:53 UTC (Mon) by sanjoy (subscriber, #5026) [Link]

For many years I've used 10x20 as my default font for everything (xterm/rxvt/emacs/twm menus/...). It's
full name is -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--20-200-75-75-c-100-iso8859-1

The letters are elegant, the lines are thick, and my eyes are not strained. I use
a 800x600 laptop display (TP 560x), which can fit one 80x28 rxvt or a similar-sized emacs.
I bind many function keys so that I can quickly switch
among the various ssh (in rxvt), emacs, lynx (in rxvt), and galeon
windows.

I'm using a Debian testing system (XFree 4.3.0) with sub-pixel
rendering, although I don't know whether 10x20 benefits from it,
but it looks very nice as it is.

-Sanjoy

Font

Posted Jun 6, 2004 13:34 UTC (Sun) by X-Nc (guest, #1661) [Link]

> > -adobe-courier-medium-r-normal--12-120-75-75-m-70-iso8859-1
>
> xterm -fg '#f0f0c0' +sb -bg '#050510' -fn lucidasanstypewriter-12

Man, both of these are quite decent, though I like the sans a little better. What would be ideal is to have the font lucidasanstypewriter but the size to be the same as -fn 7x14 is.

Font

Posted Jun 4, 2004 22:22 UTC (Fri) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] (1 responses)

It is a bit counter-intuitive that the font you mention as the one you like in your xterms is not the font used in your xterm screenshot.

Font

Posted Jun 4, 2004 22:31 UTC (Fri) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

Good point. I had completely cleared out all of my X resources before starting the xterm and taking the screenshot as a way of keeping any of my local changes from creating confusion. Maybe I'll regenerate it real quick.

Font

Posted Jun 10, 2004 21:33 UTC (Thu) by pimlott (guest, #1535) [Link] (1 responses)

Ok, can anyone tell me why Jon's font, -adobe-courier-medium-r-normal--12-120-75-75-m-70-iso8859-1 looks like hell (screenshot of xterm -fn -adobe-courier-medium-r-normal--12-120-75-75-m-70-iso8859-1) on my Debian testing system? These are bitmap fonts, so there's no reason they should vary at all, right? I even restarted X with different -dpi resolutions, with no difference.

I've always wondered why many of the bitmap fonts were so ugly, but maybe I'm doing something wrong? Finding a terminal font for X is a torturous process for me. I used the venerable fixed aka 6x13 aka -misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1 for many years, but when I got a high-res laptop (133 dpi), that was too small. I don't even care what the font face is called, I just want a nice, clean bitmap font (a well-hinted truetype font would be fine, but the hinting patents seem to rule that out) at a readable pixel size. After much trial and error, I found terminus-16 aka -xos4-terminus-medium-r-normal--16-160-72-72-c-80-iso10646-1 from the xfonts-terminus package in Debian. But I don't understand why there isn't a font picker that can just show me all 8x16 bitmap fonts available, and why there are so many unusably-ugly bitmap fonts.

Font

Posted Jun 11, 2004 3:14 UTC (Fri) by pimlott (guest, #1535) [Link]

Argh, I'm an idiot. I didn't have xfonts-75dpi installed.