The Linux Console Tools: Font files

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## 7. Font files

## 7.1 The formats

The primary font file format for the Linux Console Tools, as of version 0.2.x, is the PSF format, which is also used by `kbd`. 0.3.x will introduce the XPSF format, which will be able to replace all existing file formats.

Raw fonts can be converted into PSF files with the `font2psf(1)` (written by Martin Lohner, SuSE GmbH).

Versions 0.2.x do not have support for the CP format again - this will come back in the 0.3.x development branch.

## 7.2 Tools

### Font-files manipulation tools

The `psfaddtable(1)`, `psfgettable(1)`, and `psfstriptable(1)` tools are provided by the Linux Console Tools for manipulation of the SFM embedded in PSF files. These are the only font-manipulation tools provided by the Linux Console Tools as of version 0.2.x. The `font2psf(1)` tool is available in the `contrib` directory to convert old raw fonts into PSF fonts.

There are plans for a more generic font-conversion tool based on libcfont. It will be mostly trivial to write once work on libcfont will be advanced enough.

The only way provided by the Linux Console Tools to display a font's contents is to load it, and then to display it using `showfont(1)`.

### Font editors

I do not curently know of a good font-editor suitable for editing console fonts. I tried `fonter`, but this one has a bad design flaw: you can only properly edit cp437 fonts (or maybe ASCII-based fonts if you like unreadable screens) because it works on the console and loads the font you are editing. I was told about `cse` which I did not tried yet. Marcin Kowalczyk is working on the fonty tool (which I did not check yet either), which will help font designers, but is not AFAIK a real editor. Robert de Bath works on his own tools which handle a variety of file formats and table formats.

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