Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 71642
"Fixed" family of finely-crafted bitmap fonts would be appreciated.
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:38:03 EDT
A lot of us old farts are really used to (ok, addicted, whatever you want to call it) to the hand-crafted "fixed" family of fonts. We're used to calling them "9x15", "10x20", etc, but we are trainable and can get used to calling them "Fixed" and selecting a size in the new font selector... We would either like for the fixed family of fonts to be made available as part of the bitmap-fonts package or for a new package (doesn't even have to be installed by default called "fixed-fonts" or something to be made available that puts the fixed family where Xft can find it. Thanks!
Note that this could be done with symlinks, as long as Xft will read gzipped fonts, in which case bitmap-fonts would gain a dependency. (See bug #71641 for more on that.) Or the symlinks could be added to the XFree86-base-fonts package. I don't know what the best way to do this would be.
A separate package would definitely be easiest; I'd like to maintain a separation between "all the crappy X fonts" and "fonts we think people might want to actually use" Adding misc-fixed to bitmap fonts is fairly non-trivial, because it involves taking the assorted bitmaps and turning them into a set of coherent fonts... which one of 6x13, 7x13, 8x13 do you use? Or do you presnet three familes "Terminal" "Terminal condensed" "Terminal semicondensed" where condensed and semicondenseed are only available at 13 point? Not to mention problems with every font size having different character coverage.
I'd be *completely* happy with a separate package. Especially now that I know that you can't use the gzipped format for Xft, as you pointed out in bug #71641 -- so my symlink idea goes right out the window. I would think that the fonts with commonly used nicknames would be the ones. The set I would suggest, as a single fixed family, would be only the misc-fixed, not sony-fixed, and of those, 5x7, 6x9, 6x13 (which is also "fixed", the old default and so widely used), 7x13, 8x13, 9x15, and 10x20. That seems like a manageable number of fonts. Does that selection make sense to you? In terms of every font size having different character coverage, the point here is to merely maintain existing usage, not to extend to new usage. That's one of the reasons that I suggest that this doesn't have to be installed by default, just available to old unix hacks who can read release notes. :-)
Well, the problem wasn't the *number* of fonts (adding 4x6 or whatever wouldn't hurt), but the existance of 6x13, 7x13, and 8x13, which are all 13 point fonts. If we went with 6x13 for it's status as 'fixed', it doesn't really match the the surrounding 6x9, 8x15 at all in aspect ratio... (Garr, meant to dup this one, will add a comment to bug 68534 pointing to discussion here) *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 68354 ***
I guess you skip 7x13 and 8x13 because 6x13 is the standard "fixed" font that people are used to, and so that's one of the most important.