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BDF2PSF(1) Console-setup User's Manual BDF2PSF(1)
NAME
bdf2psf - convert a BDF font to PSF format for the Linux console
SYNOPSIS
bdf2psf [--fb] [--log logfile] bdf{+bdf} equivalence{+equivalence} sym-
bols{+[:]symbols} size psf [sfm]
DESCRIPTION
The program bdf2psf translates BDF fonts to PSF format. It accepts
fonts with arbitrary size of the font matrix. If the width of the glyph
matrix of the source font is 7 or 9 pixels then it generates fonts with
width of 8 pixels.
OPTIONS
--fb Generate font for framebuffer. There are two important differ-
ences between the framebuffer and the text mode. First, all
fonts in text mode have to have matrix 8 pixels width. They also
have to have either 256 or 512 glyphs. Second, in most text
modes the hardware does some magic in order to use 8 pixels
width fonts as if they were 9 pixels width. In order to achieve
this the video hardware copies the 8th column in the 9th column
of the glyphs with codes from 0xC0 to 0xDF and from 0x1C0 to
0x1DF. Bdf2psf is very careful when deciding where to place a
particular glyph and as a result the encoding of the generated
font is more or less arbitrary.
--log logfile
Record in the file logfile any problems during the conversion.
bdf{+bdf}
The "+"-separated list of the source BDF font(s). When a partic-
ular symbol is defined in more than one of the specified fonts
then fonts listed first take precedence.
equivalence{+equivalence}
A "+"-separated list of files defining an equivalence relation
between the glyphs. See the section EQUIVALENCE FILES below.
symbols{+[:]symbols}
A "+"-separated list of files describing character sets. The
generated font will support all specified character sets. When
there is no space in the PSF font for all symbols, the character
sets listed first take precedence. When a colon before a char-
acter set is specified no warnings will be issued for symbols
that could not be placed in the font. See the section CHARACTER
SETS below.
size The size of the PSF font. Usually 256 or 512 glyphs.
psf The name of the generated font. If a file with this name
already exists it will be overwritten.
sfm Save in the file sfm the SFM of the generated font. This parame-
ter is optional.
CHARACTER SETS
The encodings of the traditional console fonts a similar to the stan-
dard encodings of the different languages. For example there are fonts
for all variants of ISO 8859. This is redundant, for example ISO
8859-1, ISO 8859-9 and ISO 8859-15 differ only by few characters and
can be easily covered by only one font.
In order to determine the minimal set of character sets a clustering
algorithm has been used. The source code of fontconfig contains lists
of the characters that most languages require - one list per language.
We started with one character set per language and used the clustering
algorithm in order to join the character sets to bigger. The character
sets described in files installed in the directory fontsets were the
result of the algorithm. These files list the unicodes of the symbols
of the character set, one per line. Comments starting with a sharp sign
are also allowed.
The files ascii.set, linux.set, freebsd.set and useful.set contain four
special character sets. The first lists the ASCII symbols and the sec-
ond and the third list the symbols from the so called alternate charac-
ter set (see section "Line Graphics" of terminfo(5)) - one for Linux
and one for FreeBSD. Notice that in order to limit itself to the cp437
character set, the Linux console driver does some approximations of the
symbols from the alternate character set. For example it prints U+256A
(BOX DRAWINGS VERTICAL SINGLE AND HORIZONTAL DOUBLE) instead of the
not-equal sign. The file linux.set lists the symbols used by the Linux
console driver (i.e. U+256A instead of the not-equal sign). The sym-
bols from freebsd.set are not fixed by the FreeBSD kernel, but there
too there are some approximations.
In most cases there is more available space in the fonts than neces-
sary. The spare codes can be filled with the symbols from the use-
ful.set special character set. It is convenient to use a colon before
the name of useful.set on the command line of bdf2psf so no warnings
are issued when there is no space in the font for some of these sym-
bols.
EQUIVALENCE FILES
The equivalence files define an equivalence relation between unicodes.
The sharp sign is used for comments, the empty lines are ignored. All
other lines should list two or more unicodes. Only one glyph will be
allocated in the PSF font for these unicodes.
Example:
U+2126 U+03A9
# U+2126: OHM SIGN
# U+03A9: GREEK CAPITAL LETTER OMEGA
U+041D U+0048
# U+041D: CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER EN
# U+0048: LATIN CAPITAL LETTER H
This equivalence file says that U+2126 (the Ohm sign) and U+03A9
(Omega) have the same look so only one glyph is enough for them. And
also U+041D (Cyrillic En) and U+0048 (Latin H) look the same.
Two equivalence files are provided - standard.equivalents and ara-
bic.equivalents. The first one can be used for all fonts. The purpose
of the second is to reduce the number of the necessary glyphs for the
Arabic letters at the cost of the font quality. It should be used only
for fonts that have to support Arabic but there is not enough space in
the PSF font for all Arabic characters. The Uni1 character set is a
character set that requires arabic.equivalents.
FILES
All mentioned files and directories are usually installed in
/usr/share/bdf2psf or /usr/local/share/bdf2psf.
AUTHOR
Anton Zinoviev <anton@lml.bas.bg>
console-setup 2006-01-16 BDF2PSF(1)
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