Re: Regarding VGA Fonts ?

Teunis Peters (teunis@usa.net)
Thu, 18 Sep 1997 15:27:06 -0600 (MDT)


On Thu, 18 Sep 1997, Sachin Garg wrote:

> Where can I get more information related to the screen fonts used by Linux
> to display text on the console? If I set a font say t.fnt on my machine,
> how is it possible (if at all) to use the same font on some machine which
> is telnetting into my machine?

kbd-utils (Primary-site: ftp.funet.fi:/pub/Linux/PEOPLE/Linus
373k kbd-0.94.tar.gz)

[for more fonts:
sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/system/Keyboards/kbd_fonts.tar.gz]
(warning - I haven't checked these links...)

It is NOT possible to have that font show up on a telnet session (not
unless someone changes the font upload/download code so it can go through
telnet <hint hint> :)

> What I am mainly interested is the formats of the various fonts i.e. the
> .fnt, .psf (is it postscript),.cp etc. ? Is it possible to convert fonts
> in metafont to the consolefonts? are any utilities available?

IIRC, X apparently wipes out the font settings....

The format of a .PSF file is as follows: (from kbd_utils)

Byte Size of field Contents
0 Word File ID, always 0436h
2 Byte File mode

=== FILE MODE 0: 256 character byte-aligned monofont (as used by EGA/VGA)

3 Byte Height of characters in scan lines
4... 256x[byte 3] bytes Font data; each character contains one byte
per scan line, characters continuous

=== FILE MODE 1: 512 character byte-aligned monofont

3 Byte Height of characters in scan lines
4... 512x[byte 3] bytes Font data; each character contains one byte
per scan line, characters continuous

----

G'day, eh?
- Teunis