1XFONTSEL(1) General Commands Manual XFONTSEL(1)
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6 xfontsel - point and click selection of X11 font names
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9 xfontsel [-toolkitoption ...] [-pattern fontname] [-print] [-sample
10 text] [-sample16 text16] [-sampleUCS textUCS] [-scaled]
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13 The xfontsel application provides a simple way to display the fonts
14 known to your X server, examine samples of each, and retrieve the X
15 Logical Font Description ("XLFD") full name for a font.
16 If -pattern is not specified, all fonts with XLFD 14-part names will be
18 selectable. To work with only a subset of the fonts, specify -pattern
19 followed by a partially or fully qualified font name; e.g., ``-pattern
20 *medium*'' will select that subset of fonts which contain the string
21 ``medium'' somewhere in their font name. Be careful about escaping
22 wildcard characters in your shell.
23 If -print is specified on the command line the selected font specifier
25 will be written to standard output when the quit button is activated.
26 Regardless of whether or not -print was specified, the font specifier
27 may be made the PRIMARY (text) selection by activating the select but‐
28 ton.
29 The -sample option specifies the sample text to be used to display the
31 selected font if the font is linearly indexed, overriding the default.
32 The -sample16 option specifies the sample text to be used to display
34 the selected font if the font is matrix encoded, overriding the de‐
35 fault.
36 The -sampleUCS option specifies the sample text encoded in the UTF-8
38 form to be used to display the selected font if the font has a
39 CHARSET_REGISTRY of ISO10646, overriding the default.
40 The -scaled option enables the ability to select scaled fonts at arbi‐
42 trary pixel or point sizes.
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45 Clicking any pointer button in one of the XLFD field names will pop up
46 a menu of the currently-known possibilities for that field. If previ‐
47 ous choices of other fields were made, only values for fonts which
48 matched the previously selected fields will be selectable; to make
49 other values selectable, you must deselect some other field(s) by
50 choosing the ``*'' entry in that field. Unselectable values may be
51 omitted from the menu entirely as a configuration option; see the
52 ShowUnselectable resource, below. Whenever any change is made to a
53 field value, xfontsel will assert ownership of the PRIMARY_FONT selec‐
54 tion. Other applications (see, e.g., xterm) may then retrieve the se‐
55 lected font specification.
56 Scalable fonts come back from the server with zero for the pixel size,
58 point size, and average width fields. Selecting a font name with a
59 zero in these positions results in an implementation-dependent size.
60 Any pixel or point size can be selected to scale the font to a particu‐
61 lar size. Any average width can be selected to anamorphically scale
62 the font (although you may find this challenging given the size of the
63 average width menu).
64 Clicking the left pointer button in the select widget will cause the
66 currently selected font name to become the PRIMARY text selection as
67 well as the PRIMARY_FONT selection. This then allows you to paste the
68 string into other applications. The select button remains highlighted
69 to remind you of this fact, and de-highlights when some other applica‐
70 tion takes the PRIMARY selection away. The select widget is a toggle;
71 pressing it when it is highlighted will cause xfontsel to release the
72 selection ownership and de-highlight the widget. Activating the select
73 widget twice is the only way to cause xfontsel to release the PRI‐
74 MARY_FONT selection.
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77 The application class is XFontSel. Most of the user-interface is con‐
78 figured in the app-defaults file; if this file is missing a warning
79 message will be printed to standard output and the resulting window
80 will be nearly incomprehensible.
81 Most of the significant parts of the widget hierarchy are documented in
83 /usr/share/X11/app-defaults/XFontSel,
84 Application specific resources:
86 cursor (class Cursor)
88 Specifies the cursor for the application window.
89 pattern (class Pattern)
91 Specifies the font name pattern for selecting a subset of
92 available fonts. Equivalent to the -pattern option. Most use‐
93 ful patterns will contain at least one field delimiter; e.g.
94 ``*-m-*'' for monospaced fonts.
95 pixelSizeList (class PixelSizeList)
97 Specifies a list of pixel sizes to add to the pixel size menu,
98 so that scalable fonts can be selected at those pixel sizes.
99 The default pixelSizeList contains 7, 30, 40, 50, and 60.
100 pointSizeList (class PointSizeList)
102 Specifies a list of point sizes (in units of tenths of points)
103 to add to the point size menu, so that scalable fonts can be
104 selected at those point sizes. The default pointSizeList con‐
105 tains 250, 300, 350, and 400.
106 printOnQuit (class PrintOnQuit)
108 If True the currently selected font name is printed to standard
109 output when the quit button is activated. Equivalent to the
110 -print option.
111 sampleText (class Text)
113 The sample 1-byte text to use for linearly indexed fonts. Each
114 glyph index is a single byte, with newline separating lines.
115 sampleText16 (class Text16)
117 The sample 2-byte text to use for matrix-encoded fonts. Each
118 glyph index is two bytes, with a 1-byte newline separating
119 lines.
120 scaledFonts (class ScaledFonts)
122 If True then selection of arbitrary pixel and point sizes for
123 scalable fonts is enabled.
124 Widget specific resources:
126 showUnselectable (class ShowUnselectable)
128 Specifies, for each field menu, whether or not to show values
129 that are not currently selectable, based upon previous field
130 selections. If shown, the unselectable values are clearly
131 identified as such and do not highlight when the pointer is
132 moved down the menu. The full name of this resource is
133 fieldN.menu.options.showUnselectable, class MenuButton.Simple‐
134 Menu.Options.ShowUnselectable; where N is replaced with the
135 field number (starting with the left-most field numbered 0).
136 The default is True for all but field 11 (average width of
137 characters in font) and False for field 11. If you never want
138 to see unselectable entries, '*menu.options.showUnse‐
139 lectable:False' is a reasonable thing to specify in a resource
140 file.
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143 $XFILESEARCHPATH/XFontSel
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146 xrdb(1), xfd(1)
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149 Sufficiently ambiguous patterns can be misinterpreted and lead to an
150 initial selection string which may not correspond to what the user in‐
151 tended and which may cause the initial sample text output to fail to
152 match the proffered string. Selecting any new field value will correct
153 the sample output, though possibly resulting in no matching font.
154 Should be able to return a FONT for the PRIMARY selection, not just a
156 STRING.
157 Any change in a field value will cause xfontsel to assert ownership of
159 the PRIMARY_FONT selection. Perhaps this should be parameterized.
160 When running on a slow machine, it is possible for the user to request
162 a field menu before the font names have been completely parsed. An er‐
163 ror message indicating a missing menu is printed to stderr but other‐
164 wise nothing bad (or good) happens.
165 The average-width menu is too large to be useful.
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169 Ralph R. Swick, Digital Equipment Corporation/MIT Project Athena
170 Mark Leisher <mleisher@crl.nmsu.edu> added the support for the UTF-8
172 sample text.
173X Version 11 xfontsel 1.1.0 XFONTSEL(1)