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mpu
Bitmap font edition tools.
Bitmap Font Edition Tools
Hi folks,
I wrote some tools to design bitmap fonts!
Two C programs, 'edit' and 'view', allow respectively to edit one glyph and view a text with the font currently being designed. The 'view' tool can get bitten by SIGHUP signals to refresh the view. To do this automatically when the font gets changed, I made a little shell script that uses inotify-tools to monitor the font directory energy-efficiently, it is 'watch.sh'. When done editing use the '2bdf.sh' shell script to convert the font to BDF (usable by X11). It does not work for fonts wider than 8 pixels, though, so you might have to patch it.
The font format is I think suckless, a font is simply stored in a directory named WxH where W and H are the pixel dimensions of the font. Each glyph is then stored as an ASCII file named U+NNNN where NNNN is the Unicode codepoint of the glyph. Here is what is stored in 7x10/U+0041 (glyph 'A') for the leon font
....... .xxx... x...x.. x...x.. xxxxx.. x...x.. x...x.. x...x.. ....... .......
That way, a font can be stored using git and edited using standard text-editors in a reasonable way.
I now use the font (leon) packaged in the git repo, it was pretty fun to design.
-- mpu
http://lists.suckless.org/dev/1512/28005.html
Installing BDF fonts on Linux
# According to Debian's /etc/fonts/fonts.conf
# ~/.fonts support is going to go away, when
# that's the case, you can try to use
# ~/.config/fonts below
fontsdir=~/.fonts/
mkdir $fontsdir
chmod go+rx $fontsdir
sh 2bdf.sh FONTPATH > $fontsdir/myfont.bdf
mkfontdir $fontsdir
fc-cache -f
xset fp+ $fontsdir # put this in .xinitrc
xset fp rehash # put this in .xinitrc
# That might not be sufficient. On my Debian
# computer /etc/fonts/conf.d/70-no-bitmaps.conf
# had to be removed. See [2] below.
Extra information can also be found at: [1] https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/x-fonts.html [2] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Fonts#Enabling_Bitmapped_Fonts
mpu