Fonts in XFree86 : Fonts included with XFree86
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3. Fonts included with XFree86

3.1. Standard bitmap fonts

The Sample Implementation of X11 (SI) comes with a large number of bitmap fonts, including the `fixed' family, and bitmap versions of Courier, Times, Helvetica and some members of the Lucida family. In the SI, these fonts are provided in the ISO 8859-1 encoding (ISO Latin Western-European).

In XFree86, a number of these fonts are provided in Unicode-encoded font files instead. At build time, these fonts are split into font files encoded according to legacy encodings, a process which allows us to provide the standard fonts in a number of regional encodings with no duplication of work.

For example, the font file

/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/6x13.bdf
with XLFD
-misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-c-60-iso10646-1
is a Unicode-encoded version of the standard `fixed' font with added support for the Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Georgian, Armenian, IPA and other scripts plus numerous technical symbols. It contains over 2800 glyphs, covering all characters of ISO 8859 parts 1-5, 7-10, 13-15, as well as all European IBM and Microsoft code pages, KOI8, WGL4, and the repertoires of many other character sets.

This font is used at build time for generating the font files

6x13-ISO8859-1.bdf
6x13-ISO8859-2.bdf
...
6x13-ISO8859-15.bdf
6x13-KOI8-R.bdf
with respective XLFDs
-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--13-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1
...
-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--13-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-15
-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--13-120-75-75-c-60-koi8-r
The standard short name `fixed' is normally an alias for
-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--13-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1

3.2. The ClearlyU Unicode font family

The ClearlyU family of fonts provides a set of 12 pt, 100 dpi proportional fonts with many of the glyphs needed for Unicode text. Together, the fonts contain approximately 7500 glyphs.

The main ClearlyU font has the XLFD

-mutt-clearlyu-medium-r-normal--17-120-100-100-p-101-iso10646-1 
and resides in the font file
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/cu12.pcf.gz 
Additional ClearlyU fonts include
-mutt-clearlyu alternate glyphs-medium-r-normal--17-120-100-100-p-91-iso10646-1 
-mutt-clearlyu pua-medium-r-normal--17-120-100-100-p-111-iso10646-1
-mutt-clearlyu arabic extra-medium-r-normal--17-120-100-100-p-103-fontspecific-0
-mutt-clearlyu ligature-medium-r-normal--17-120-100-100-p-141-fontspecific-0

The Alternate Glyphs font contains additional glyph shapes that are needed for certain languages. A second alternate glyph font will be provided later for cases where a character has more than one commonly used alternate shape (e.g. the Urdu heh).

The PUA font contains extra glyphs that are useful for certain rendering purposes.

The Arabic Extra font contains the glyphs necessary for characters that don't have all of their possible shapes encoded in ISO 10646. The glyphs are roughly ordered according to the order of the characters in the ISO 10646 standard.

The Ligature font contains ligatures for various scripts that may be useful for improved presentation of text.

3.3. Standard scalable fonts

XFree86 includes all the scalable fonts distributed with X11R6.

3.3.1. Standard Type 1 fonts

The IBM Courier set of fonts cover ISO 8859-1 and ISO 8859-2 as well as Adobe Standard Encoding. These fonts have XLFD

-adobe-courier-medium-*-*--0-0-0-0-m-0-*-*
and reside in the font files
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/cour*.pfa

The Adobe Utopia set of fonts only cover ISO 8859-1 as well as Adobe Standard Encoding. These fonts have XLFD

-adobe-utopia-*-*-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1
and reside in the font files
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/UT*.pfa

Finally, XFree86 also comes with Type 1 versions of Bitstream Courier and Charter. These fonts have XLFD

-bitstream-courier-*-*-normal--0-0-0-0-m-0-iso8859-1
-bitstream-charter-*-*-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1
and reside in the font files
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/c*bt_.pfb

3.3.2. Standard Speedo fonts

XFree86 includes Speedo versions of the Bitstream Courier and Charter fonts. In order to use these fonts, you should ensure that your X server is loading the `Speedo' font backend; see Troubleshooting.

These fonts cover all of ISO 8859-1 and almost all of ISO 8859-2. They have XLFD name

-bitstream-courier-*-*-normal--0-0-0-0-m-0-*-*
-bitstream-charter-*-*-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-*-*
and reside in the font files
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Speedo/font*.spd

3.4. The Bigelow & Holmes Luxi family

XFree86 includes the Luxi family of scalable fonts, in both TrueType and Type 1 format. This family consists of the fonts Luxi Serif, with XLFD

-b&h-luxi serif-medium-*-normal--*-*-*-*-p-*-*-*
Luxi Sans, with XLFD
-b&h-luxi sans-medium-*-normal--*-*-*-*-p-*-*-*
and Luxi Mono, with XLFD
-b&h-luxi mono-medium-*-normal--*-*-*-*-m-*-*-*
Each of these fonts comes Roman, oblique, bold and bold oblique variants The TrueType version have glyphs covering the basic ASCII Unicode range, the Latin 1 range, as well as the Extended Latin range and some additional punctuation characters. In particular, these fonts include all the glyphs needed for ISO 8859 parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 13 and 15, as well as all the glyphs in the Adobe Standard encoding and the Windows 3.1 character set.

The glyph coverage of the Type 1 versions is somewhat reduced, and only covers ISO 8859 parts 1, 2 and 15 as well as the Adobe Standard encoding.

The Luxi fonts are original designs by Kris Holmes and Charles Bigelow. Luxi fonts include seriffed, sans serif, and monospaced styles, in roman and oblique, and normal and bold weights. The fonts share stem weight, x-height, capital height, ascent and descent, for graphical harmony.

The character width metrics of Luxi roman and bold fonts match those of core fonts bundled with popular operating and window systems.

The license terms for the Luxi fonts are included in the file `COPYRIGHT.BH', as well as in the License document.

Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes from Bigelow and Holmes Inc. developed the Luxi typeface designs in Ikarus digital format.

URW++ Design and Development GmbH converted the Ikarus format fonts to TrueType and Type1 font programs and implemented the grid-fitting "hints" and kerning tables in the Luxi fonts.

For more information, please contact design@bigelowandholmes.com or info@urwpp.de , or consult the URW++ web site.

An earlier version of the Luxi fonts was made available under the name Lucidux. This name should no longer be used due to trademark uncertainties, and all traces of the Lucidux name have been removed from XFree86.


Fonts in XFree86 : Fonts included with XFree86
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Next: More about core fonts