1BDF2PSF(1) Console-setup User's Manual BDF2PSF(1)
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6 bdf2psf - convert a BDF font to PSF format for the Linux console
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10 bdf2psf [--fb] [--log logfile] bdf{+bdf} equivalence{+equivalence} sym‐
11 bols{+[:]symbols} size psf [sfm]
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15 The program bdf2psf translates BDF fonts to PSF format. It accepts
16 fonts with arbitrary size of the font matrix. If the width of the glyph
17 matrix of the source font is 7 or 9 pixels then it generates fonts with
18 width of 8 pixels.
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22 --fb Generate font for framebuffer. There are two important differ‐
23 ences between the framebuffer and the text mode. First, all
24 fonts in text mode have to have matrix 8 pixels width. They also
25 have to have either 256 or 512 glyphs. Second, in most text
26 modes the hardware does some magic in order to use 8 pixels
27 width fonts as if they were 9 pixels width. In order to achieve
28 this the video hardware copies the 8th column in the 9th column
29 of the glyphs with codes from 0xC0 to 0xDF and from 0x1C0 to
30 0x1DF. Bdf2psf is very careful when deciding where to place a
31 particular glyph and as a result the encoding of the generated
32 font is more or less arbitrary.
33 --log logfile
36 Record in the file logfile any problems during the conversion.
37 bdf{+bdf}
40 The "+"-separated list of the source BDF font(s). When a partic‐
41 ular symbol is defined in more than one of the specified fonts
42 then fonts listed first take precedence.
43 equivalence{+equivalence}
46 A "+"-separated list of files defining an equivalence relation
47 between the glyphs. See the section EQUIVALENCE FILES below.
48 symbols{+[:]symbols}
51 A "+"-separated list of files describing character sets. The
52 generated font will support all specified character sets. When
53 there is no space in the PSF font for all symbols, the character
54 sets listed first take precedence. When a colon before a char‐
55 acter set is specified no warnings will be issued for symbols
56 that could not be placed in the font. See the section CHARACTER
57 SETS below.
58 size The size of the PSF font. Usually 256 or 512 glyphs.
61 psf The name of the generated font. If a file with this name
64 already exists it will be overwritten.
65 sfm Save in the file sfm the SFM of the generated font. This parame‐
68 ter is optional.
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72 The encodings of the traditional console fonts a similar to the stan‐
73 dard encodings of the different languages. For example there are fonts
74 for all variants of ISO 8859. This is redundant, for example ISO
75 8859-1, ISO 8859-9 and ISO 8859-15 differ only by few characters and
76 can be easily covered by only one font.
77 In order to determine the minimal set of character sets a clustering
79 algorithm has been used. The source code of fontconfig contains lists
80 of the characters that most languages require - one list per language.
81 We started with one character set per language and used the clustering
82 algorithm in order to join the character sets to bigger. The character
83 sets described in files installed in the directory fontsets were the
84 result of the algorithm. These files list the unicodes of the symbols
85 of the character set, one per line. Comments starting with a sharp sign
86 are also allowed.
87 The files ascii.set, linux.set, freebsd.set and useful.set contain four
89 special character sets. The first lists the ASCII symbols and the sec‐
90 ond and the third list the symbols from the so called alternate charac‐
91 ter set (see section "Line Graphics" of terminfo(5)) - one for Linux
92 and one for FreeBSD. Notice that in order to limit itself to the cp437
93 character set, the Linux console driver does some approximations of the
94 symbols from the alternate character set. For example it prints U+256A
95 (BOX DRAWINGS VERTICAL SINGLE AND HORIZONTAL DOUBLE) instead of the
96 not-equal sign. The file linux.set lists the symbols used by the Linux
97 console driver (i.e. U+256A instead of the not-equal sign). The sym‐
98 bols from freebsd.set are not fixed by the FreeBSD kernel, but there
99 too there are some approximations.
100 In most cases there is more available space in the fonts than neces‐
102 sary. The spare codes can be filled with the symbols from the use‐
103 ful.set special character set. It is convenient to use a colon before
104 the name of useful.set on the command line of bdf2psf so no warnings
105 are issued when there is no space in the font for some of these sym‐
106 bols.
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110 The equivalence files define an equivalence relation between unicodes.
111 The sharp sign is used for comments, the empty lines are ignored. All
112 other lines should list two or more unicodes. Only one glyph will be
113 allocated in the PSF font for these unicodes.
114 Example:
116 U+2126 U+03A9
118 # U+2126: OHM SIGN
119 # U+03A9: GREEK CAPITAL LETTER OMEGA
120 U+041D U+0048
121 # U+041D: CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER EN
122 # U+0048: LATIN CAPITAL LETTER H
123 This equivalence file says that U+2126 (the Ohm sign) and U+03A9
125 (Omega) have the same look so only one glyph is enough for them. And
126 also U+041D (Cyrillic En) and U+0048 (Latin H) look the same.
127 Two equivalence files are provided - standard.equivalents and ara‐
129 bic.equivalents. The first one can be used for all fonts. The purpose
130 of the second is to reduce the number of the necessary glyphs for the
131 Arabic letters at the cost of the font quality. It should be used only
132 for fonts that have to support Arabic but there is not enough space in
133 the PSF font for all Arabic characters. The Uni1 character set is a
134 character set that requires arabic.equivalents.
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138 All mentioned files and directories are usually installed in
139 /usr/share/bdf2psf or /usr/local/share/bdf2psf.
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143 Anton Zinoviev <anton@lml.bas.bg>
144console-setup 2006-01-16 BDF2PSF(1)