[nzlug] All screen fonts suck, but some less so

[Daniel Pittman]

Patrick Connolly <tuxkid at ihug.co.nz> writes:

> About the only screen font I find usable is described variously in
> Redhat / Fedora Core installations as
>
> -b&h-lucidatypewriter-medium-r-normal-*-*-120-*-*-m-*-iso8859-1 
> and
> -b&h-lucidatypewriter-medium-r-normal-sans-12-120-75-75-m-70-iso8859-2
>
> I'm not sure those are exactly the same but they're close.  

They are the same font with different character registries; the later
can be used to display Central and Eastern European languages rather
than western -- in addition to the basic ASCII set.

> I never found a source of information explaining how they're set up.

Those are "X Logical Font Descriptor" definitions of the font at a
particular screen resolution, etc.  Here is the specification for them:

    http://ftp.xfree86.org/pub/XFree86/4.5.0/doc/xlfd.txt

> What I'd like to know is how I'd find a Mepis package that has that
> font.  (I assume any Debian family package would be suitable.)

They should be in 'xfonts-75dpi' -- assuming you want the 75 DPI variant
that is default in the first font and explicit in the second.


That said, today, you are probably better off investigating a set of
applications that support the 'Xft' font rendering library and provides
high quality hinted, optionally anti-aliased or sub-pixel rendered and
multi-level glyphs from TrueType, OpenType and Type 1 fonts.

Regards,
        Daniel
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