The 9x15 font versus DOSEMU's vga font

9x15

vga

I dipped into my archives to fish out the old DOSEMU vga font.  It is a thing of beauty.

• The 9x15 existed on Lubuntu and I must have been using it throughout my time up until Lubuntu's retirement on 2016-03-26.

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Comparison ∞

9x15 has been my long-time favourite though.

• Compared to 9x15, vga is taller and thinner* vga doesn't look too good with bold fonts, so it should be used with a terminal that supports un-bolding (e.g. xfce's terminal) or after editing LS_COLORS to not use bold (e.g. 01;32 becomes 00;32)

Notes ∞

2014-06-04 ∞

Tested aterm 1.00.01 on 2014-06-04 on Lubuntu 14.04, updated recently.

FONTDIR="/usr/share/fonts/X11/misc"
file=vga.pcf.gz

\sudo  \mkdir  --parents  "$FONTDIR"
\mkdir  temp.$$
\cd     temp.$$
\cp  ../$file  ./
\gzip  -d $file
\sudo  \cp  ./vga.pcf  $FONTDIR
\cd  $FONTDIR
\sudo  \mkfontdir
\xset  fp  rehash
\xset  fp+ $FONTDIR
\cd  -

For aterm, I can make this font default by editing ~/.Xdefaults and adding

aterm*font:         vga

See aterm for more changes.

2009-04-18 ∞

This was probably tested with Unity Linux.

I have no note as to which terminal I was using back then.

To install vga, one of these ought to work.

• kcontrol - The KDE control panel

• drakfont - This didn't work for me.  drakfont --install vga.pcf.gz gave me "There are no PostScript fonts in this directory" so it's probably not the right command to use.

Some distributions allow this:

• FONTDIR=~/.fonts

Maybe this is XOrg, or just for newer X installations.  It's what worked for me on PCLinuxOS 2007 (updated recently):

• FONTDIR=/usr/share/fonts/misc/

Standard X11 stuff, works ok on Slackware 8.0 etc.:

• FONTDIR=/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/local/

If you use FONTDIR, then do this:

\cp  vga.pcf.gz  $FONTDIR
\cd  $FONTDIR
\mkfontscale
\mkfontdir
\fc-cache
\echo  Now restart X

Using ∞

Your font can can be specified when opening the terminal, with a command like this:

\xterm  -fn vga  -bg black  -fg gray  -geometry 80x24+0+0

Most terminals are xterm-compatible, in that you could just replace xterm with your terminal of choice:

rxvt  -fn vga  -bg black  -fg gray  -geometry 80x24+0+0

Using with "modern" terminals ∞

(props)

Some terminals only use the stock fonts and won't use your misc. .pcf fonts.  This includes gnome-terminal and xfce's terminal.

To fix this, edit ~/.fonts.conf and add these lines right after the <fontconfig> opening tag:

<!-- Accept bitmap fonts -->
<selectfont>
<acceptfont>
<pattern>
<patelt name="scalable"><bool>false</bool></patelt>
</pattern>
</acceptfont>
</selectfont>

Oldschool Linux ∞

vga will be included in Oldschool Linux and used by default, but I will also make sure there is an easy way to revert back to the 9x15 (or possibly any font of choice).