Console Fonts

[Simos Xenitellis]

On Thu, 2004-04-01 at 06:57, Aman ALAM wrote:
> Hello
> 
> Any body tell me something about console fonts. What they are ? how they 
> can generate
> How we can able to work with them. For Indian Language, Is there any 
> availble
> console fonts.

Some technicalities.
Normally the console can show 256 different glyphs at the same time.
With a kernel hack some time ago, this was raised to 512 (in this mode
you have no blinking, inverse and other attributes like that).
The font format has a file extension of .psfu.
The 'u' means that the file has information about the Unicode code of
each characters. Thus, would can edit those files and add what
characters you deem appropriate for your users.
By default most distros (RedHat, Fedora, ..?) set the console mode to
512 characters (run "showconsolefont" on the console, or try "showfont"
for a bit older distros) and they accomodate the following languages:
- Latin based
- Arabic
- Cyrillic
- Hebrew

For more on console fonts, check out the 'kbd' package.
When your system boots up, it runs /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit which invokes
/sbin/setsysfont (script) and loads the proper font. You must not change
these files; you have to set the console font name in
/etc/sysconfig/i18n (initially manually, then from the installation
program!)

If there is no Punjabi console font in /lib/kbd/consolefonts, you can
make one using any fixed-size font (for example, TTF). Search the
Internet for those details.

This is the soft way to enable Punjabi fonts "soon". I think you can get
fonts in the kernel as mentioned by Gertjan but this requires prompt
action and then patience :)

Good luck,
Simos Xenitellis
http://simos.info/