Xgterm fonts

Gabriel wrote on Aug 13, 2009

Hi,

recently I modified my system (Fedora 9) by removing some stuff and apparently this changed something about the way 'xgterm' uses fonts, because now when it loads it displays the default font. I load (or use to, at least) 'xgterm' with the following command:

xgterm -sbr -fn 9x15 -sl 400 -cr red -title IRAF -e "(ds9 &; chdir $HOME/iraf ; cl)"

Now this doesn't work. It's like the '9x15' parameter isn't there any more (I've also tried '10x20', but still nothing)

The only thing that seems to work is if I replace '-fn 9x15' with '-font lucidasanstypewriter-14'. I can change the '14' to 8, 10 or 12 but not to 11 or 9. If I do so, it goes back to the default font.

I've looked around, but I couldn't found anywhere a way to select a different font for 'xgterm'.

It's not much of an issue, but it's annoying.
Any help will be much appreciated.

Cheers,
Gabriel

---

Mike Fitzpatrick wrote on Aug 13, 2009

The answer may depend on exactly what it is you removed, but assuming it wasn't any of the fonts..... Fonts like 9x15 are pretty standard are should be in a directory like /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc. X11 finds files like this using the XFILESEARCHPATH environment variable which is a colon-delimited list of directories such as

 setenv XFILESEARCHPATH ":/usr/lib/X11/%T/%N%S:/usr/x11R6/lib/X11/%T/%N%S:/usr
/local/lib/%T/%N%S:"

Things like the '%T' have special meaning so only change the path at the beginning.

If you don't have this variable defined in your environment, see if it was set earlier when things worked. It may be for instance that you define this in your .login file but xgterm isn't running as a 'login shell' and so only your .cshrc file is read. You can use the "-ls" argument to xgterm to force a login shell. In any case, you can use the 'xlsfonts' command to list what fonts the system thinks are available, e.g.

% xlsfonts | grep 9x15

-Mike

---

Gabriel wrote on Aug 13, 2009

Hi,

there's no /usr/X11R6/ directory in my system, but there's a /var/cache/man/X11R6/ dir with 10 'cat*' dirs inside (where '*' stands for numbers from 1 to 9 and an 'n' letter)

The 'xslfonts' command lists:

6x13
cursor
fixed
lucidasans-10
lucidasans-12
lucidasans-14
lucidasans-18
lucidasans-24
lucidasans-8
lucidasans-bold-10
lucidasans-bold-12
lucidasans-bold-14
lucidasans-bold-18
lucidasans-bold-24
lucidasans-bold-8
lucidasans-bolditalic-10
lucidasans-bolditalic-12
lucidasans-bolditalic-14
lucidasans-bolditalic-18
lucidasans-bolditalic-24
lucidasans-bolditalic-8
lucidasans-italic-10
lucidasans-italic-12
lucidasans-italic-14
lucidasans-italic-18
lucidasans-italic-24
lucidasans-italic-8
lucidasanstypewriter-10
lucidasanstypewriter-12
lucidasanstypewriter-14
lucidasanstypewriter-18
lucidasanstypewriter-24
lucidasanstypewriter-8
lucidasanstypewriter-bold-10
lucidasanstypewriter-bold-12
lucidasanstypewriter-bold-14
lucidasanstypewriter-bold-18
lucidasanstypewriter-bold-24
lucidasanstypewriter-bold-8

and a bunch of lines like:

-urw-urw palladio l-medium-i-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-5
-urw-urw palladio l-medium-i-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-9
-urw-urw palladio l-medium-i-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-koi8-e
-urw-urw palladio l-medium-i-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-koi8-r
-urw-urw palladio l-medium-i-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-koi8-ru
-urw-urw palladio l-medium-i-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-koi8-u
-urw-urw palladio l-medium-i-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-koi8-uni
-urw-urw palladio l-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso10646-1
-urw-urw palladio l-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1
-urw-urw palladio l-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-15
-urw-urw palladio l-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-2
-urw-urw palladio l-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-3
-urw-urw palladio l-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-5
-urw-urw palladio l-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-9
-urw-urw palladio l-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-koi8-e
-urw-urw palladio l-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-koi8-r
-urw-urw palladio l-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-koi8-ru
-urw-urw palladio l-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-koi8-u
-urw-urw palladio l-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-koi8-uni
-xfree86-cursor-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-adobe-fontspecific
etc...

For now I'm using lucidasanstypewriter-12 font, but I would really like to know how to set the old 9x15 font back.

Thanks!

---

Gabriel wrote on Aug 13, 2009

Well, it was simpler than I thought. I installed the 'misc bitmap fonts for the X Window System' and the missing fonts were back.

Cheers!
Gabriel

---

rathna wrote on Aug 13, 2009

I faced a similar problem. Installing 'misc bitmap fonts for the X Window System' helped solve the problem.Thank you for the post!

---

Last post on Aug 13, 2009