This is as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

And this is Fonts and xchat, written , and concerning Howtos, Linux

Couple of outstanding things: Are you annoyed by how xchat-gnome in edgy hangs for ages when you connect to a server, because it's popped up the channel list? Yeah, so am I. Set it to auto-join a channel (doesn't matter which one, so make one up if you want) in Edit > Preferences > Networks > (network) > Edit > User and Channels and it'll stop doing it. David Trowbridge and the xchat-gnome people are aware of how annoying this is and they're doing something about it. Are you also annoyed by having blurry anti-aliased TTF fonts* in gnome-terminal? The font I really like for terminal windows is ProFont, which looks really, really clear at tiny sizes like 7pt, because it's a bitmapped font (also called a PCF). Normally, you make a font available to your apps by dropping it in the .fonts folder*, but bitmapped fonts aren't enabled by default. From a terminal, run sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config on edgy (that might be just sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig on other distros or dapper), and go through the questions (choosing the default answers), but tell it that you want to enable bitmapped fonts when it asks. Then download the ProFont (bitmap font) for Linux/UNIX (new version) and put the .pcf files in your .fonts folder in your home directory (which you might have to create). You'll have to restart any terminals you have open, but then ProFont will be available for you to use as a font (and in all your other apps too).

Comments

Filip Salomonsson

Oh, thankyou thankyou thankyou for the bitmap config thingie! My eyes are less sore already.

Davyd

Alternatively, rather than reconfiguring your whole system to enable bitmapped fonts (oh god, the pain), you can tell fontconfig just to enable one single bitmapped font.

20-davyd-enable-fixed.conf

You will need to changed Fixed to the family of the font that you wish to add. The fontconfig XML format is reasonably well documented.

You can also do this without requiring root access to your machine, but I forget the file path to drop the file in.

sil

Davyd: aha. I saw your note about doing that, but I couldn't work out how to do it without writing files in /etc, and I don't like doing that :)

Just as a stupid question, why aren't fonts in .fonts automatically enabled? I clearly want them...

This website belongs to Stuart Langridge. Contact details are available. Don't eat yellow snow. Valid HTML5, at least in theory, except for the bits that aren't because I'm that futuristic that I'm ahead of the spec, oh yes. HTML5 help from Bruce Lawson, among others. Fonts from the superb FontSquirrel. End.