Episode: 107
Title: HPR0107: Console fonts
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0107/hpr0107.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 11:34:20

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So
Hello HackerPublic Radio people, this is Dave again and coming to you from the Honda Civic
doing another installment of HackerPublic Radio and actually this installment is a couple
of days late.
This was to have aired two days ago but I'm just now recording it.
I have been slack or slacker than usual I should say.
I've just been very busy.
Anyway, for what it's worth, here it is anyway and I want to, in addition to just doing
a HackerPublic Radio episode, I want to do one with a disclaimer.
This episode will not be extremely authoritative and I'm not an expert on this, I'm not experts
around word and authority, I am somewhat of an authority, I know enough about which I
am getting ready to speak to get what I need to get done, but I am by no means an expert
on the subject and as such I will occasionally misspeak and as well as me doing this from
a car, me doing this as well as is that correct English?
I am doing this from a car so I'm going to use that as an excuse as well as when I incorrectly
describe something as being this or that.
Anyway, what I want to talk about is what I did to beautify my fonts and specifically
fonts in terminal windows and virtual terminals in Linux and this is information of course
it can be found on the internet and if this picture interests any you may want to do some
Google searching on the subject, but I want to talk about setting up the terminus fonts
and or aren't with fonts for that matter, for use in X windows and X term windows or
X terminals and as well as the virtual console.
So we will start with X terms.
If you're using the GNOME terminal or XFCE4 terminal or console, this is easy enough
though and once you have the terminus fonts installed, if you're not interested in the
terminus fonts, terminus fonts are by the way a family of bitmap fonts and that's where
I want to claim some ignorance, I'm pretty sure these are bitmap fonts and I get confused
sometimes there's bitmap and there's true top fonts and you can anti alias some of those
or maybe both, I'm not sure, but there's bitmap and there's true top and I'm sure there's
others too, but specifically, I'm talking about terminus fonts and art with fonts, those
are both bitmap and normally out of the box, those three terminal packages, the ones
I just mentioned, GNOME terminal, XFCE4 terminal and console are going to come pre-configured
with probably true top but mono spaced, that may be a contradiction too, they come pre-configured
with a quite usable set of fonts but the terminus fonts are touted as being quite easy
on the eyes for prolonged use and using the terminal or virtual terms, oftentimes people
will be at those for a long period of time so terminus is supposed to reduce eye strain,
I just like the terminus fonts because they look better and they are easier to read anyway,
but before you can customize any of these terminals, these three that I've just mentioned
are a term or e-term or x-term or any of the other terminals, terminal windows, you're
going to need to install the terminus set of fonts and this is going to be Debbie in specific,
Debbie in her Ubuntu specific, so you would need to install those and that's done with
an apt git install terminus, what's not just terminus, it's going to be like a exfiance-terminus
and you might as well if they're available in your repo, install the art with two fonts so
that the apt git install exfiance-art with two, all with two fonts are often used in fluxbox
for menus and they do look nice, especially on LCD screens, that's my opinion at least anyway,
and now that you have the exfiance-terminus fonts installed, you will need to set up
but you'll need to reconfigure the font-config-config program, so as a privileged user do
the pkg- reconfigure space font-config-config and there'll be several, but this is already
configured for you, that's where you're doing a reconfig, so when you install your distro,
this package comes with a already pre-configured, so and more than likely bitmap fonts haven't been
enabled, or at least with Debbie and Ubuntu they aren't, so that's why you're doing the dptg-reconfigure
own font-config-config, and you can accept the defaults for all of these, the screens that
incursus dialog will come up and you'll be presenting with some choices, all of which right now are
my memory sort of fuzzy on, it's going to ask you about sub-pixel rendering, if you want that done
automatically or bitmap font, well the screen you're most concerned with is the one where to ask
you if you want to use bitmap fonts, let's put yes here, this will not keep you or prevent you from
using any of the other fonts or true type fonts, this will allow you to use bitmap fonts in addition,
once you've done that then from within, so do the dptg-reconfigure font-config-config,
and enable the bitmap font option, and after you've done that you will then be able to see
the terminus fonts and the artless fonts if you have them installed, available as options in
the configuration dialogs for GNOME terminal or xfce4 terminal or console, and like I said if you have
those terminal packages installed, which I'm sure you do, that's easy enough to configure from a
drop-down menu, I think you can right click and GNOME terminal and select edit current profile or
you can right click and xfce4 terminal and go to preferences and then under appearances or maybe
fonts, you can see a drop-down there, you can choose terminus there, or from console you can
from the settings menu, possibly configure console and then go to the fonts dialog there and choose
terminus, but what if you're using x term or a term or e term, how do you do that? Well they're
they each handle a little differently, I'm only going to talk about x term because that's
commonly installed by default among Linux distributions, but with the boots who specifically,
if you hit it control and then right click inside of x term window, you will see a pop-up menu or a
drop-down, I guess a menu appear and you can select different size fonts and there'll be
in the case of Ubuntu it's a great out selection for select or execute selection which,
you know once you set the font size you can then make that selection permanent, but that's
great out in Ubuntu, so that the option to set the font from the right click menu has been
disabled in Ubuntu, so how do you get around that? Well you create a file in your home directory,
hidden file called diet capital x defaults, you know, before you do that, well I guess go ahead and
do that, you can, you know, just find them and edit that file that doesn't exist or create the file
that doesn't exist, and then using a problem called x font sale, that's short for x font selection,
this x fointit scl, fire that up and what you're presented with is a window and with several
eight or nine selections that you can select, and you select them from left to right and as you
make a selection it narrows your choices and others, and that my members are going to be fuzzy on
this too in the car, but I mean I think it starts out with a foundry, so for the x terminus font
you click on foundry and you'll choose x os 4 and then under the next when you click family,
and like I said this is going to be from memory and it best fuzzy, you choose terminus and then
et cetera, down the line, the menus at the top you just click and select, and what you're going to
end up with is a description of the terminus font, and it reads something like dash x os 4 dash
terminus dash medium dash r dash normal dash asterix dash 14 dash 140 dash 72 dash 72 dash c
dash 80, well that's dash asterix dash c dash 80 dash ISO 8859 dash 15, I will not read that
again, but my point is is use x font sale to pick the fonts you want, and this is only going to list
the bitmap fonts, and it's going to list all the information you need, that's what's between all
those dashes, and then you take that string that's generated in the x font sale window and you use
that in your dot capital x default file that you just created in your home directory, so
you'll want to create two lines in your dot x default file that you just created, and they both,
well the first line is going to be x term asterix font space colon, I think there's a space,
might as be colon, and then that string dash x os 4 dash terminus dash medium dash et cetera et cetera,
and then create another line below that one that says x term asterix bold capital f font colon
in that same string, and the reason you're putting the same string is because it's
widely held believe that bold fonts look bad in x term windows, anyway this will do two things,
it will enable determinus fonts in your x term window as well as prohibit the use of bold fonts for
the terminus fonts, so if you've configured, if you don't like I said, and you've configured
GNOME terminal xfce 4 terminal and console to use the terminus fonts, and then done the x term,
and that's 4 terminals all configured to use that, so I know which terminal you're going to use,
you're going to be using the same size terminus fonts in each of them, so that's a consistency thing,
plus you know it's a readability thing, so I recommend doing this if you haven't already, I think you will
be impressed with the improvement, it's a noticeable improvement, at least in my mind, I think it
looks better than the sands font that comes by default, now say you wanted to do this in,
oh I guess before I go much further, before I leave x windows, I just got a new Lenovo ThinkPad T61,
and it's got a 15.4 inch TFT LCD monitor LCD screen, and I'm running at the native resolution,
which I think is 1680 by 1050 or something like that, now when I first used it, the fonts were
just way too small for my soon to be 42 year old eyes, and I went through the motions of increasing
the font sizes and doing things like that, and it was, I wasn't getting the effect I wanted,
especially in fluxbox because I could make the fonts bigger in applications, I could make the fonts
bigger, and you know, I was having to do this for GNOME, and GNOME apps and KDE apps, I was having to
do it in X terms, but the fluxbox menu, it was still way too small, and I realized that it was because
my DPI settings, dots per inch I guess, or what that stands for, were set at 96, which it isn't
the best selection for a widescreen monitor, especially when running at 1680 by 1050 on a 15.4 inch
display, so you can look up charts on the internet, but in essence what you do is you measure the
diagonal dimension of your screen, your 15.4 inch display, and there's a chart you can look up
that number against your resolution, because you the dots per inch that are most conducive for
visible fonts, and in my case it was going to be 129, and that rendered the fonts too big for me,
so I settle on 120, so that's easy enough to set up in your GNOME dialogues, your GNOME settings,
and your KDE settings, and XFC settings, there's places for under display or window manager or
fonts, so I guess it's under parents and fonts on each of those window environments, you can set
the DPI to 120 in my case, or 96, or whatever you want, but if you want that to carry over to
window managers like FluxBox, that don't come with a graphical tool where you can set the dots
per inch for that session, the X section, you'll need to set this up in GDM, so you can run as a
privileged user GDM setup, and under the security tab there is a button that says configure X server,
and there's a string in there that actually starts X, it's going to say start X, base dash,
VR, space something, I don't know what it's going to say exactly, but it's looking for the string
in the GDM setup, under security under configure X server that starts X, I'll say start X something,
and then some other stuff, and you will want to insert in there a dash DPI space 120 in my case
after start X, and when you restart X, or restart GDM next time you reboot or restart GDM in
FluxBox, it will then have the same DPI that Genome and KDE do, so your menus are going to look
better, more readable for nearly 42-year-old eyes. Anyway, I'm going to leave X Windows for the moment,
or I guess for the episode, and move to the virtual terminal, and I've been using Linux for
more than a dozen years, and this is something I've never done. Every distribution I've ever installed
has taken upon itself to set up the console for me, or there's something you do, and you don't
really set the defaults, and you go on install Linux and get to using it, and maybe never give
it a second thought as far as the fonts go for your virtual terminals. But if you want to use
terminus fonts for your virtual terminal, what you need to do is as a privileged user do an app
get install console dash terminus, and this one installs obviously enough, the terminus fonts for
the console, and then you will need to reconfigure console dash setup that package. So as a
privileged user again do a DPKG dash reconfigure space console dash setup, and from there you will be
supplied with the already configured defaults, but when you get to the screen, and I've actually
forgotten what the screen says, but you'll be, I guess it's the encoding, character encoding screen.
The terminus fonts don't do characters Greek and Hebrew, so you will want to limit your choices
here to, I guess it's Latin, Slavic and non Slavic, and I will mispronounce this Cyrillic CYR-I-L-L-I-C. I've
never known how to say that word. Anyway, that choice on that particular incursus screen reads combined
dash Latin comma Slavic and non Slavic and Cyrillic. Choose that one because if you
choose one that has Greek and Hebrew, in there as well, the terminus fonts will not become
available to you. Anyway, the very next screen allows you to choose bitmap fonts, and it will
allow you to choose the terminus fonts, and I think if you've installed the console dash terminus
font package, you'll have a terminus bold terminus VGA and maybe a terminus VGA bold. This is
LCD, so I just chose terminus, not terminus bold because it's going to look like crap, and
was done, and when I immediately, that change took place immediately, I had terminus fonts in my console.
Now one thing I did have to do is by default the console was rendered, I think at 800 by 600 or
something, so I had to add the VGA equals 897 or something to get a 14. I think that's what it was,
I can't remember, I'm going to eat 67, you can look that chart up too, but on my grub stands,
I had to add a VGA equals 897 to get 1440 by 900 resolution. Anyway, that's what I did, and
in some fuzzy detail and probably some misspeaks along the way, that's as best as I can describe it
in a car, what I did to enable bitmap fonts across the board and all my X term windows, and the
specifically the terminus package in artworks too as well, in my virtual console too, so if you've
not done this, a lot of you probably have, but if you haven't given it a try, it's not going to
hurt anything, you can always change it back to like it was, this is an easy thing to do, but it's
a thing that should make your life more better, especially when you're spending time at the console.
Anyway, that's going to do it for now, and tune in to Maul for another Hacker Public Radio.
