fontsx(5)

fontsx -- miscellaneous information on graphics fonts in UnixWare

Description

This manual page provides miscellaneous information on fonts in the UnixWare Desktop. All such fonts are X Window System fonts, either bitmapped fonts or scalable outline fonts.

Fonts shipped with unixWare

All the Latin-1 (ISO8859-1) bitmapped fonts in X11R5 are shipped in one of three packages: dtxt (Graphics Utilities), which contains the few bitmapped fonts needed for the X server to run and a few others; desktop (Desktop Manager), which contains a small set of fonts of some variety, allowing the Desktop to run; and dtxtfonts (Graphics Supplemental Fonts), which contains the majority of the X11R5 bitmapped fonts. The first two packages are installed by default; dtxtfonts, which takes up considerable disk space, must be selected during installation or installed later. The bitmapped fonts are in three directories, 75dpi, 100dpi, and misc; a 12-point font from the 75dpi directory is 12 points on a monitor whose DPI is 75, but will be slightly different from 12 points on monitors with other DPI resolutions.

The Adobe Utopia (TM) scalable fonts from X11R5, as well as 13 other Type 1 fonts licensed from Adobe, are in the atm package and are installed by default. Type 1 scalable fonts are rendered using Adobe Type Manager^® (ATM^®), which is integrated into the font server of UnixWare; if ATM is installed, the contributed Type 1 renderer from X11R5 is removed from the system. The contributed Speedo renderer from X11R5 is part of the dtxtfonts package, but the Speedo outline fonts from X11R5 are not included in any package.

Differences from x11R5

Some X11R5 bitmapped fonts were supplied with ASCII-only character sets but marked as ISO8859-1. These fonts, mostly in the Clean family but also in the Fixed family, have had their CHARSET fields in their XLFD names changed to ISO646.199-IRV. This convention has been adopted in X11R6, and is the official name for the ASCII character set.

The X11R5 font aliases for the Xview system, such as lucidasans-10, have been removed from this release of UnixWare.

Monitor resolution and font pointsize

It is useful to remember that font point size is a real-world dimension (there are approximately 72 points to an inch) and that font sizes on your display are dependent on your monitor size setting. The Display_Setup application of the Desktop allows you to change your settings for the graphics card you have; it also allows you to update the size of your display monitor; this information is stored in the option monitor_size in the file /usr/X/defaults/Xwinconfig. Unfortunately, there is no way for the system to detect the physical size of your monitor.

When setting your monitor size, note that monitor manufacturers sometimes exaggerate the size (usually quoted as a diagonal size, like 21 inches); if precision in your fonts (or other measures) on your display is important, you may want to measure
your monitor size (height and width) by hand and use the sizes you obtain in your configuration. New values take affect the next time the X server is started.

The X server uses the configured graphics card resolution, such as VGA (640x480) or 1024x768, expressed in pixels, and the monitor size, in inches, to determine the effective DPI (dots per inch) of your screen for applications. This DPI value affects your fonts in two ways.

First, scalable outline fonts rendered by ATM use the DPI figure in figuring out how many pixels to use to make a font for a requested point size. Second, the Display Setup application adjusts font configuration files if the DPI figure is closer to 100dpi than to 75dpi (e.g., for high-resolution graphics card/monitor combinations): it makes the 100dpi directory appear first in the font path so bitmapped fonts closer to the real resolution of the monitor are used.

Note also that the DPI value is computed for both the vertical and horizontal direction. If your monitor size does not reflect the same width/height ratio as the graphics card resolution (e.g., the 4/3 ratio of VGA and 1024/768), these DPI values will differ slightly. This is not a problem unless exact precision is needed.

Notes on desktop fonts appearance

The default (proportional) font for the Desktop in general is Helvetica Medium 12-point; the default for Terminal windows is LucidaTypewriter Medium 12-point. These can be changed using the Fonts application in the Preferences folder. The font shown in the text pane, and highlighted in the scrolling lists, when the Fonts application first starts, is the current default (proportional) font for the Desktop, whether the system default or the one last chosen by the user. There is no way to tell from the Fonts application what the current Terminal (monospaced) font is for the Desktop; however, it is the value of the *xterm*Font resource in the user's $HOME/.Xdefaults file, where it is updated by the Fonts application when the user changes it.

Motif does not do this, and so the user sees a difference: Note that, especially if your graphic card/monitor configuration is not precise, subtleties in the way default font sizes are used can make the default Helvetica font used in some applications a little smaller or larger (usually smaller). For example, when you first run the Desktop, the font used in the Fonts application may appear smaller than that used in the window manager (e.g., for window titles). This difference can be eliminated by using the Apply to Windows menu item in the Fonts application to change your desktop font to another font, and then back to Helvetica Medium 12-point, expressly chosen and applied (using the Restore Defaults menu item will maintain the small size difference).

Notes on desktop fonts application

The Fonts application in the Preferences folder of the Desktop allows you to see all your installed fonts (as well as to install Type 1 fonts from DOS diskettes).

Duplicate point sizes sometimes appear in the scrolling list for Point Size. This is usually caused by a font having the same FAMILY name but a different character set or AVERAGE_WIDTH. Use the View - Character Set menu button and you will see the differences in the fonts.

Fonts that do not contain the ISO8859-1 character set, whether they are the ASCII-only iso646.1991-irv fonts or Hebrew or Japanese fonts, cannot be used with the Apply to Windows feature of the Fonts application.

Some underlying changes in how X handles font names between X11R4 and X11R5 affect the Fonts application. One consequence is that if you run the current UnixWare (based on X11R5) Fonts client on a display whose X server is X11R4, such as UnixWare 1.x, then some scalable fonts on that server--those for which bitmapped fonts of the same family and style exist--will not show up in the Fonts window as scalable; the Point Size scrolling list will show only the pointsizes of the bitmapped font.

CDE standard font names

The industry effort for a common UNIX system desktop, known as CDE (Common Desktop Environment), has two sets of CDE Standard Font Names, the standard Application names and the standard Interface names. These font names are required on any X server on which the CDE Desktop is to be displayed.

These standard CDE names are implemented for the UnixWare X Server, even though CDE 1.0 itself is not part of UnixWare. When this package is installed, a CDE desktop running on some other machine in a network may display on a UnixWare machine's X display. The names are in the Graphics Supplemental Fonts package (dtxtfonts); this package must be installed for the names to be available.

All the CDE standard fonts names have a FAMILY_NAME field of -dt-. A listing of them can thus be obtained with the command:

xlsfonts -fn -dt-*

Miscellaneous

See the Desktop User Handbook for information on how to type the non-ASCII Latin-1 characters, the accented letters used in European languages, into a window when you only have an ASCII keyboard.

Files

/usr/X/lib/fonts
/usr/X/lib/fs/config
/usr/X/defaults/Xwinconfig
$HOME/.Xdefaults

References

fs(1), xlsfonts(X1)