Re: utf8 console font
On Tue, May 06, 2008 at 11:04:38PM +1200, Chris Bannister wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Just wondering which console font people are using in an utf8 locale.
sigma-general-8x16 ;) [ It's from sigma-consolefonts which is my own
assemblage, derived from etl16, and includes a number of different
maps (the maps decide which characters are available in a particular
psfu font). ]
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/zarniwhoop/consolefonts/sigma.html .
End of blowing my own trumpet. I must remember to update that font
with a few minor fixes.
>
> Any tips?
>
Screen fonts fall into two types - the 'vga' fonts derived from
what you get from the video card (usually very bold), and the others
(often less bold, which might be a problem for some people). You
then have the "256 glyphs and bold colours, or 512 glyphs without the
bold colours" decision. There is also a size consideration (fewer
lines of text, or more lines of text) FWIW, mine is up-to 512 glyphs
and «less bold» with only an 8x16 "cell".
The big question is, which languages do you want to support in the
console ? Most fonts are limited to only a few languages. If you
already have UTF-8 text in all the languages of interest to you, or
you can create some (remember punctuation, quotation marks, currency
symbols as well as the accented letters), then try using the
different fonts ('setfont') to see how well they cope. For
non-ascii text, creating it is usually a lot easier in a graphical
environment.
I assume you already know that only alphabetic languages can be
displayed in the regular linux console.
Of course, there are also visual choices for any font, such as
'what letter form for "g"?', and "how many rows of the character cell
are used for the text?" and even "what do you display when the glyph
isn't available?". Many console fonts use different glyphs for
cyrillic and latin letters (e.g. Aa|Аа B|В and perhaps C|С) which to
me looks strange. There is definitely no "one size fits all".
ĸen
--
das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce