Provided by: bdf2psf_1.194ubuntu3_all bug

NAME

       bdf2psf - convert a BDF font to PSF format for the Linux console

SYNOPSIS

       bdf2psf  [--fb]  [--log  logfile] bdf{+bdf} equivalence{+equivalence} symbols{+[:]symbols}
       size psf [sfm]

DESCRIPTION

       The program bdf2psf translates BDF fonts to PSF format. It accepts  fonts  with  arbitrary
       size  of  the  font  matrix. If the width of the glyph matrix of the source font is 7 or 9
       pixels then it generates fonts with width of 8 pixels.

OPTIONS

       --fb   Generate font for framebuffer. There are  two  important  differences  between  the
              framebuffer  and the text mode. First, all fonts in text mode have to have matrix 8
              pixels width. They also have to have either 256 or 512 glyphs. Second, in most text
              modes  the hardware does some magic in order to use 8 pixels width fonts as if they
              were 9 pixels width. In order to achieve this the video  hardware  copies  the  8th
              column  in the 9th column of the glyphs with codes from 0xC0 to 0xDF and from 0x1C0
              to 0x1DF.  Bdf2psf is very careful when deciding where to place a particular  glyph
              and as a result the encoding of the generated font is more or less arbitrary.

       --log logfile
              Record in the file logfile any problems during the conversion.

       bdf{+bdf}
              The  "+"-separated  list  of  the  source  BDF font(s). When a particular symbol is
              defined in more than one of the  specified  fonts  then  fonts  listed  first  take
              precedence.

       equivalence{+equivalence}
              A  "+"-separated list of files defining an equivalence relation between the glyphs.
              See the section EQUIVALENCE FILES below.

       symbols{+[:]symbols}
              A "+"-separated list of files describing character sets.  The generated  font  will
              support  all  specified character sets.  When there is no space in the PSF font for
              all symbols, the character sets listed first take precedence.  When a colon  before
              a  character set is specified no warnings will be issued for symbols that could not
              be placed in the font. See the section CHARACTER SETS below.

       size   The size of the PSF font. Usually 256 or 512 glyphs.

       psf    The name of the generated font.  If a file with this name already exists it will be
              overwritten.

       sfm    Save in the file sfm the SFM of the generated font. This parameter is optional.

CHARACTER SETS

       The  encodings of the traditional console fonts a similar to the standard encodings of the
       different languages.  For example there are fonts for all variants of ISO 8859.   This  is
       redundant,  for  example  ISO  8859-1,  ISO  8859-9  and  ISO  8859-15  differ only by few
       characters and can be easily covered by only one font.

       In order to determine the minimal set of character sets a clustering  algorithm  has  been
       used.  The  source code of fontconfig contains lists of the characters that most languages
       require - one list per language. We started with one character set per language  and  used
       the  clustering  algorithm  in  order to join the character sets to bigger.  The character
       sets described in files installed in  the  directory  fontsets  were  the  result  of  the
       algorithm.   These  files  list  the unicodes of the symbols of the character set, one per
       line. Comments starting with a sharp sign are also allowed.

       The files ascii.set, linux.set, freebsd.set and useful.set contain four special  character
       sets.   The  first  lists  the ASCII symbols and the second and the third list the symbols
       from the so called alternate character set (see section "Line Graphics" of terminfo(5))  -
       one  for  Linux  and  one  for FreeBSD.  Notice that in order to limit itself to the cp437
       character set, the Linux console driver does some approximations of the symbols  from  the
       alternate  character  set.  For example it prints U+256A (BOX DRAWINGS VERTICAL SINGLE AND
       HORIZONTAL DOUBLE) instead of the not-equal sign. The file  linux.set  lists  the  symbols
       used by the Linux console driver (i.e. U+256A instead of the not-equal sign).  The symbols
       from freebsd.set are not fixed by the  FreeBSD  kernel,  but  there  too  there  are  some
       approximations.

       In  most  cases there is more available space in the fonts than necessary. The spare codes
       can be filled with  the  symbols  from  the  useful.set  special  character  set.   It  is
       convenient  to use a colon before the name of useful.set on the command line of bdf2psf so
       no warnings are issued when there is no space in the font for some of these symbols.

EQUIVALENCE FILES

       The equivalence files define an equivalence relation between unicodes. The sharp  sign  is
       used  for  comments,  the empty lines are ignored. All other lines should list two or more
       unicodes.  Only one glyph will be allocated in the PSF font for these unicodes.

       Example:

            U+2126 U+03A9
            # U+2126:   OHM SIGN
            # U+03A9:   GREEK CAPITAL LETTER OMEGA
            U+041D U+0048
            # U+041D:   CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER EN
            # U+0048:   LATIN CAPITAL LETTER H

       This equivalence file says that U+2126 (the Ohm sign) and U+03A9  (Omega)  have  the  same
       look so only one glyph is enough for them. And also U+041D (Cyrillic En) and U+0048 (Latin
       H) look the same.

       Two equivalence files are provided -  standard.equivalents  and  arabic.equivalents.   The
       first one can be used for all fonts.  The purpose of the second is to reduce the number of
       the necessary glyphs for the Arabic letters at the cost of the font quality.  It should be
       used  only  for fonts that have to support Arabic but there is not enough space in the PSF
       font for all Arabic characters.  The Uni1 character set is a character set  that  requires
       arabic.equivalents.

FILES

       All  mentioned  files  and  directories  are  usually  installed  in /usr/share/bdf2psf or
       /usr/local/share/bdf2psf.

AUTHOR

       Anton Zinoviev <anton@lml.bas.bg>