fnt/README at master · mpu/fnt · GitHub

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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