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Hello list, |
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|
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This is to summarise what I did in case anyone else wants to do |
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something similar. |
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|
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Last May I was looking for a font that would distinguish the upper-case |
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letter O from the numbers 0 and 8 on a virtual TTY with a frame-buffer. |
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My difficulty was twofold: the available unicode fonts were all too |
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small, and the only bigger fonts I could find had an oblique stroke |
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through the zero which made it look like an eight[1], and some of them |
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even had serifs. |
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|
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The first step was to find a font that looked good. I chose terminus |
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font, which included fonts up to 32 pixels tall and had an attractive |
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and easily read shape to its characters. |
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|
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The second step was to find a font editor, and I found nafe[2]. I |
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fetched it and compiled it locally. GCC threw out an error but the |
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program seemed to work anyway. I followed its readme.txt and used the |
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text editor joe to replace the oblique stroke in the zero with spaces, |
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and to round the shoulders; I made sure I kept the line lengths the |
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same, though it's supposed not to be necessary. Lastly I gzip'd the new |
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font file. |
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|
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The shoulders could be made more rounded, but for the moment I'm happy |
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with the result I have. |
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|
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Thirdly, working at a virtual console, I replaced the original |
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/usr/share/consolefonts/ter-v20n.psf.gz with my new version and called |
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"etc/init.d/consolefont restart". Lovely! |
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|
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There was still a problem though: when I ran a kernel menuconfig the |
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line characters were displayed as question marks; the system log on VT12 |
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couldn't display all the characters right either. |
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|
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The reason was straightforward. I'd noticed that nafe used file-name |
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suffix .psfu for fonts with unicode maps and .psf for those without. |
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Since all the files in /usr/share/consolefonts had .psf I assumed they |
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didn't need the map. Wrong. So I added the unicode map into my new.ter- |
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v20n.psf to make new.ter-v20n.psfu, then gzip'd it and copied it back |
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into /usr/share/consolefonts as ter-v20n.psf.gz. (Notice the missing u.) |
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Now I get the expected display of kernel menuconfig and the VT12 log. |
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|
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The final step was to add /usr/share/consolefonts to CONFIG_PROTECT in |
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/etc/portage/make.conf so that I wouldn't lose my changes at the next |
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upgrade. |
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|
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I've attached my three new console fonts for anyone who'd like to use |
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them. I've settled on the 22-pixel version pro tem. |
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|
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Thanks to David Haller for getting me started by pointing me in the |
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right direction. |
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|
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1. Where did that oblique stroke come from? Was it just copied blindly |
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from those nasty old line printers, with their poor resolution? It must |
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surely be time now to get rid of it. |
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|
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2. Not another font editor: http://sourceforge.net/projects/nafe/files/nafe/nafe-0.1/ |
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|
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-- |
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Rgds |
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Peter. |
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