Ubuntu

misc-fixed font in gnome-terminal

Asked by muerto_

cannot choose misc-fixed font in gnome terminal. also cannot select it in system->preferences->font

ubuntu 7.04

#xlsfonts | grep misc-fixed
showin a lot of it...

font section in xorg.conf are filled correctly.

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Jorge Juan
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Best Jorge Juan (jjchico) said : 		#1

misc-fixed is a bitmapped font, in contrast to outline (TrueType) fonts. By defalult, applications using the fontconfig library (gnome, openoffice, etc.) only use outline fonts. You can change it by reconfiguring the fontconfig-config package by running:

$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config

One of the screens says:

By default, only outline fonts are used by applications which support │
 │ fontconfig. Outline fonts are fonts which scale well to various sizes. │
 │ In contrast, bitmapped fonts are often lower quality. Enabling this │
 │ option will affect the systemwide default; this and many other │
 │ fontconfig options may be enabled or disabled on a per-user basis. │
 │ │
 │ Enable bitmapped fonts by default? │
 │ │
 │ <Yes> <No>

I do not advise to to so because you will end up with a lot of poor quality fonts available.

You can change it in a user basis by creating a .fonts.conf file in your home directory. To see the file format an examples see the system config files in /etc/fonts/. Specially, the file /etc/fonts/yes-bitmaps.conf may be of interest to you.

Hope this helps.

jorge.

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muerto_ (muerto-) said : 		#2

misc-fixed is good choise for gnome-terminal in case of gcc output, or "tail -f" command for some kinds log files, or for any kind of big and fast text data scrolling. ttf fonts are quite slowly rendered and do not look native in text output :)

anyway - thanks a lot :)

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muerto_ (muerto-) said : 		#3

Thanks Jorge Juan, that solved my question.

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Jorge Juan (jjchico) said : 		#4

fixed fonts are still available for applications that do not use fontconfig, like xterm.

For example:

$ xterm -fn "-misc-fixed-bold-r-normal--0-0-100-100-c-0-iso8859-15"

This will give you a terminal with the desired font without cluttering the fontconfig configuration.