EsoErik

Monday, December 21, 2009

Using Windows Terminal Blocky Font With All Codepage 437 Characters in X11 On Linux and OS X

I must have the Windows terminal default font for SlickEdit and for my console in Linux and on OS X. All codepage 437 characters must be rendered properly. I will not abide a single pixel of deviation from windows terminal rendering.

Andale mono, you say? Andale mono is lithe, anorexic, spindly and illegible. The default cmd.exe font is copyrighted 1984 by Bitstream Inc. It is old, fat, and perfect.

However, neither all the font ebuilds available in Gentoo nor the default fonts included with X-Quartz supply this sturdy, stalwart font. It must be converted from vgaoem.fon to .pcf.gz. To do so, I completed the following steps:

Download and build the latest full Wine sources, omitting nothing

wine-1.1.12/tools/fnt2bdf -c iso10646-1 -f vgaoem -t vgaoem.fon

bdftopcf vgaoem_r400-12.bdf -o vgaoem.pcf

```
gzip vgaoem.pcf
```
```
mkdir fonts
```
```
mv vgaoem.pcf.gz fonts/
```
```
cd fonts
```
```
mkfontdir
```
```
xset +fp ~/fonts
```
```
xset fp rehash
```

After successfully completing these steps, executing

 xterm -fn -windows-terminal-medium-r-normal--12-120-96-96-c-80-iso10646-1

, running midnight commander, and using the ctrl-right click xterm menu to enable line-drawing characters produced the following beauty:

Here, we see bold characters and line drawing codepage 437 characters rendered correctly with the converted Windows terminal font on Linux. Copying the gz file to OS X and placing it in a new fonts directory within my home provided the same functionality.

In order to verify pixel-perfect fidelity, I screenshotted Visual Slickedit on OS X and Windows and overlayed them in Photoshop. I set the overlay layer to 65% opacity and difference blending mode. Here is part of the image with the layers intentionally offset to demonstrate the effect: