Re: [gentoo-user] Making a new frame-buffer console font

[Walter Dnes]

On Tue, Feb 03, 2015 at 02:43:31PM +0000, Peter Humphrey wrote
> Hello list,
>
> This is to summarise what I did in case anyone else wants to do
> something similar.
>
> Last May I was looking for a font that would distinguish the upper-case
> letter O from the numbers 0 and 8 on a virtual TTY with a frame-buffer.
> My difficulty was twofold: the available unicode fonts were all too
> small, and the only bigger fonts I could find had an oblique stroke
> through the zero which made it look like an eight[1], and some of them
> even had serifs.
>
> The first step was to find a font that looked good. I chose terminus
> font, which included fonts up to 32 pixels tall and had an attractive
> and easily read shape to its characters.
>
> The second step was to find a font editor, and I found nafe[2]. I
> fetched it and compiled it locally. GCC threw out an error but the
> program seemed to work anyway. I followed its readme.txt and used the
> text editor joe to replace the oblique stroke in the zero with spaces,
> and to round the shoulders; I made sure I kept the line lengths the
> same, though it's supposed not to be necessary. Lastly I gzip'd the new
> font file.

  A bit of a tangent... do you know of any font editors that will
convert a font to "double-wide"?  E.g. convert 8x8 to 16x8, 8x12 to
16x12, or 8x16 to 16x16.  The reason I ask is because I have a laptop
with a 1280x800 screen.  Back in the old days, the native VGA display
would've been 80 columns across.  But now with framebuffer drivers, the
straight text display is almost unreadable 160 columns across.  Going to
the Sun 12x22 font gives me 107 columns across, but that's still not
good.  That's why I'm looking for 16-pixel-wide fonts, either freely
available, or try to generate them from existing 8-pixel-wide fonts.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes@××××××××.org>
I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications