Re: Fonts for xvile in linux - where to find some nice ones?

[Thomas Dickey]

On Thu, May 07, 2020 at 01:11:30AM +1000, Brendan O'Dea wrote:
> There is quite a bit of difference in how traditional X11 bitmap fonts
> and freetype fonts are selected and rendered
> (https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/XFontTypes gives a
> reasonable summation) but the main thing is that from the API level
> they are not interchangeable.  XTerm has specific code to handle
> rendering of fonts selected via -fn (server bitmap) vs -fa (client
> rendered scalable).  I don't believe that xvile has handling for the
> latter, so is limited to traditional server provided bitmap fonts.

agreed - the APIs are very different.  There was no _technical_ reason
that they had to be incompatible...

Having both in xterm makes it complicated.  If/when I find time to
do TrueType for xvile, it'll be one or the other at configure/make
time.

However, I mostly use vile in xterm, and after _that_, winvile.

I was just starting to review where I was with winvile in Windows 10,
which had two gotchas that I want to have out of the way before
making new installers.

> On Thu, 7 May 2020 at 00:48, Chris Green <address@hidden> wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, May 06, 2020 at 07:32:21AM -0400, Paul Fox wrote:
> > > chris wrote:
> > >  > On Tue, May 05, 2020 at 06:54:48PM -0400, Thomas Dickey wrote:
> > >  > > On Tue, May 05, 2020 at 10:43:47PM +0100, Chris Green wrote:
> > >  > > > I am always hitting this issue, the current fonts available by 
> > > default
> > >  > > > in standard Linux repositories for xvile are generally horrible.  
> > > Does
> > >  > > > anyone here have any nice ones, or can anyone point me at some nice
> > >  > > > ones.
> > >  > >
> > >  > > There's two sets of fonts in the default menu for xvile.
> > >  > > The first looks like the bitmap fonts used for xterm,
> > >  > > while the other is b&h lucidatypewriter --
> > >  > >
> > >  > > you might find this as
> > >  > >  bitmap-lucida-typewriter-fonts
> > >  > > or
> > >  > >  xfonts-100dpi
> > >  > >  xfonts-75dpi
> > >  > >
> > >  > Yes, I have all of those, I was just hoping/wondering if anyone has
> > >  > created different/better bitmap fonts.  They're OK[ish] on my desktop
> > >  > machine but I can't find anything that is really comfortable to use on
> > >  > my laptop.
> > >
> > > I haven't thought about fonts in a long time.  Is it the case that
> > > xvile can't use the same fonts that xterm uses?  I don't use xvile,
> > > but I'm pretty happy with my fixed xterm fonts.
> > >
> > xvile is stuck with the old and rarely renewed/maintained fixed bitmap
> > fonts in /etc/X11/fonts whereas vile can use all of the standard
> > terminal fonts to be found in /usr/share/fonts.  I'm not sure if xterm
> > can use the 'ordinary' system fonts in the same way that other
> > terminal emulators can, I use the default xfce4-terminal that comes
> > with the xubuntu distribution that I use and that shows me dozens (if
> > not hundreds) of different fonts to choose from.
> >
> > --
> > Chris Green
> >
> 

-- 
Thomas E. Dickey <address@hidden>
https://invisible-island.net
ftp://ftp.invisible-island.net

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