Fonts in Linux

Timothy J Bruce

10 Jul 2012 23:10

Fonts are important. With different fonts you can emphasize text or just give your text a little pizzazz. Or you could simply make it more readable to your own eyes (which of course is a subjective measure). Many people don't change fonts, but instead change it using italics or bold or change the size (usually measured in points or 72nds of an inch).

There are several different commands to list the fonts available on Linux.

$ fc-list

is one way to list fonts. This will list all the vector based fonts (True Type Fonts or TTF and Adbobe Type 1 Fonts or PBF). There may be other types of Vector fonts installed. Another is:

$ xlsfonts

One thing you may want to do is sort the list or run it through grep to filter out some things, especially since there is no specific order for the fonts to be returned in.

This page might also help: http://crunchbanglinux.org/wiki/urxvt

For many of my consoles (terminal sessions) like xterm, I like to use mono-spaced raster-based fonts. These are some additional fonts I was looking at with xterm:

timb@tardis:~$ xterm -fn r14
timb@tardis:~$ xterm -fn r24
timb@tardis:~$ xterm -fn 12x24
timb@tardis:~$ xterm -fn 10x20
timb@tardis:~$ xterm -fn 5x8
timb@tardis:~$ xterm -fn -rfx-courier-bold-o-normal--0-0-0-0-m-0-microsoft-cp1251

Fonts on Krycek (from xtermfonts didiwiki page)

Some of the fonts I can use:

Various Fonts

xterm -fn '-adobe-courier-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-2'
xterm -fn '-bitstream-courier 10 pitch-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-m-0-ascii-0'
xterm -fn '-bitstream-courier 10 pitch-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-m-0-iso8859-1'
xterm -fn '-misc-fixed-bold-r-normal--0-0-100-100-c-0-iso8859-1'
xterm -fn '-misc-fixed-bold-r-normal--0-0-75-75-c-0-iso8859-1'
xterm -fn '-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--14-130-75-75-c-70-iso10646-1'
xterm -fn '-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--15-120-100-100-c-90-iso8859-1'
xterm -fn '-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--18-120-100-100-c-90-iso8859-1'
xterm -fn '-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--20-200-75-75-c-100-iso8859-1'

xterm -fn '-misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--12-110-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1'
xterm -fn '-misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1'

xterm -fn '-schumacher-clean-medium-r-normal--0-0-75-75-c-0-iso8859-1'
xterm -fn '-schumacher-clean-medium-r-normal--12-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1'

Standard Fixed

xterm -fn '7x13'
xterm -fn '8x13'
xterm -fn '8x16'
xterm -fn '9x15'
xterm -fn 'a14'

Misc Fixed

xterm -fa MiscFixed -fs 8
xterm -fa MiscFixed -fs 10
xterm -fa MiscFixed -fs 12

Fixed

xterm -fa fixed -fs 8
xterm -fa fixed -fs 9

xterm -fa fixed -fs 10

xterm -fa fixed -fs 12