The Small Fonts Package

Introduction

5x9 and 5x10 are two X11 fonts intended for use with xterm or other programs requiring readable small fonts. At only 5 pixels wide, they are particularly well suited to small laptop screens, allowing two 80 column windows side by side on an 800x600 screen (albeit with no room for window frames), or three windows across with room to spare on a 1280x1024 screen, with room to spare.

The fonts implement VT100 line-drawing characters. Bolding is not directly supported; xterm does adequate bolding by duplicating pixels.

Editing bitmaps

Two scripts, bdfdecode.awk and bdfencode.awk are provided to turn BDF files into character mapped bitmap files and vice-versa. The character mapped files are simply BDF files with the bits encoded as one bit per character instead of as hex, allowing easy editing of the bitmap with any text editor.

Editing the bitmaps in character mapped files is fairly straightforward. Alphanumeric characters indicate a set bit, spaces or special characters indicate a clear bit. Ensure the number of lines between the BITMAP and ENDCHAR lines is correct. Characters outside the expected width of the bitmap are ignored.

bdfdecode.awk places '.'s instead of spaces on the baseline of the character for reference, but these don't need to be maintained (although it's easier to see what you're doing if they are).

Compiling fonts:

Modern X servers use PCF files, usually gzipped. To convert a the 5x10 BDF file to a gzipped PCF:

	bdftopcf 5x10.bdf | gzip > 5x10.pcf.gz

Keep the BDF files, as there may not be a nice simple tool handy to re-generate them from the BDF file.

Installing

Find a location in your X11 fonts tree structure to place the fonts, e.g. /usr/share/X11/fonts/misc. Ensure that the directory is included; if running the X Font Server (xfs), the list is in the "catalogue =" directive of the xfs configuration file -- see the xfs manual page. If not, the list will be in the FontPath directive in see xorg.conf.

Place the 5x9.pcf.gz and 5x10.pcf.gz in the directory. Issue the command 'mkfontdir /usr/share/X11/fonts/misc' to re-read the font files and rebuild the fonts.dir file in the directory (assuming the directory is /usr/share/X11/fonts/misc).

If required, add the following lines to the fonts.alias file in the directory:

5x9          -gnu-fixed-medium-r-normal--9-100-75-75-c-50-iso8859-1
5x10         -gnu-fixed-medium-r-normal--10-100-75-75-c-50-iso8859-1

This will allow the fonts to be referred to by the names '5x9' & '5x10', e.g. 'xterm -fn 5x10'.

After completing these changes, reload xfs (on RedHat derived systems, 'service xfs reload'; others just killall -HUP xfs). If not using xfs, restart X to pick up the new fonts.

The file "install.sh" will perform the above steps automatically. If it can not correctly identify the appropriate fonts directory, specify this on the command line.

Xterm resources

Xterm can be configured to use a font by default by setting the xterm.font resource to '5x10' or '5x9' (assuming you have created the appropriate entries in the fonts.alias file). See the xterm documentation on how to change the xterm font menus.

Copyright

The small fonts are public domain. These are adapted from the example at http://chem.skku.ac.kr/~wkpark/project/webfed/trash/bdftofon/5x10.bdf and modified to improve consistency and readability. The original file is provided as 5x10orig.bdf for comparison.