NAME¶
xfontsel - point and click selection of X11 font names
SYNTAX¶
xfontsel [-
toolkitoption ...] [
-pattern
fontname] [-print] [-sample
text] [-sample16 text16]
[ -sampleUCS textUCS]
[-scaled]
DESCRIPTION¶
The
xfontsel application provides a simple way to display the fonts known
to your X server, examine samples of each, and retrieve the X Logical Font
Description ("XLFD") full name for a font.
If
-pattern is not specified, all fonts with XLFD 14-part names will be
selectable. To work with only a subset of the fonts, specify
-pattern
followed by a partially or fully qualified font name; e.g., ``-pattern
*medium*'' will select that subset of fonts which contain the string
``medium'' somewhere in their font name. Be careful about escaping wildcard
characters in your shell.
If
-print is specified on the command line the selected font specifier
will be written to standard output when the
quit button is activated.
Regardless of whether or not
-print was specified, the font specifier
may be made the PRIMARY (text) selection by activating the
select
button.
The
-sample option specifies the sample text to be used to display the
selected font if the font is linearly indexed, overriding the default.
The
-sample16 option specifies the sample text to be used to display the
selected font if the font is matrix encoded, overriding the default.
The
-sampleUCS option specifies the sample text encoded in the UTF-8 form
to be used to display the selected font if the font has a CHARSET_REGISTRY of
ISO10646, overriding the default.
The
-scaled option enables the ability to select scaled fonts at
arbitrary pixel or point sizes.
INTERACTIONS¶
Clicking any pointer button in one of the XLFD field names will pop up a menu of
the currently-known possibilities for that field. If previous choices of other
fields were made, only values for fonts which matched the previously selected
fields will be selectable; to make other values selectable, you must deselect
some other field(s) by choosing the ``*'' entry in that field. Unselectable
values may be omitted from the menu entirely as a configuration option; see
the
ShowUnselectable resource, below. Whenever any change is made to a
field value,
xfontsel will assert ownership of the PRIMARY_FONT
selection. Other applications (see, e.g.,
xterm) may then retrieve the
selected font specification.
Scalable fonts come back from the server with zero for the pixel size, point
size, and average width fields. Selecting a font name with a zero in these
positions results in an implementation-dependent size. Any pixel or point size
can be selected to scale the font to a particular size. Any average width can
be selected to anamorphically scale the font (although you may find this
challenging given the size of the average width menu).
Clicking the left pointer button in the
select widget will cause the
currently selected font name to become the PRIMARY text selection as well as
the PRIMARY_FONT selection. This then allows you to paste the string into
other applications. The
select button remains highlighted to remind you
of this fact, and de-highlights when some other application takes the PRIMARY
selection away. The
select widget is a toggle; pressing it when it is
highlighted will cause
xfontsel to release the selection ownership and
de-highlight the widget. Activating the
select widget twice is the only
way to cause
xfontsel to release the PRIMARY_FONT selection.
RESOURCES¶
The application class is
XFontSel. Most of the user-interface is
configured in the app-defaults file; if this file is missing a warning message
will be printed to standard output and the resulting window will be nearly
incomprehensible.
Most of the significant parts of the widget hierarchy are documented in
/etc/X11/app-defaults/XFontSel,
Application specific resources:
- cursor (class Cursor)
- Specifies the cursor for the application window.
- pattern (class Pattern)
- Specifies the font name pattern for selecting a subset of
available fonts. Equivalent to the -pattern option. Most useful
patterns will contain at least one field delimiter; e.g. ``*-m-*'' for
monospaced fonts.
- pixelSizeList (class
PixelSizeList)
- Specifies a list of pixel sizes to add to the pixel size
menu, so that scalable fonts can be selected at those pixel sizes. The
default pixelSizeList contains 7, 30, 40, 50, and 60.
- pointSizeList (class
PointSizeList)
- Specifies a list of point sizes (in units of tenths of
points) to add to the point size menu, so that scalable fonts can be
selected at those point sizes. The default pointSizeList contains 250,
300, 350, and 400.
- printOnQuit (class PrintOnQuit)
- If True the currently selected font name is printed
to standard output when the quit button is activated. Equivalent to the
-print option.
- sampleText (class Text)
- The sample 1-byte text to use for linearly indexed fonts.
Each glyph index is a single byte, with newline separating lines.
- sampleText16 (class Text16)
- The sample 2-byte text to use for matrix-encoded fonts.
Each glyph index is two bytes, with a 1-byte newline separating
lines.
- scaledFonts (class ScaledFonts)
- If True then selection of arbitrary pixel and point
sizes for scalable fonts is enabled.
Widget specific resources:
- showUnselectable (class
ShowUnselectable)
- Specifies, for each field menu, whether or not to show
values that are not currently selectable, based upon previous field
selections. If shown, the unselectable values are clearly identified as
such and do not highlight when the pointer is moved down the menu. The
full name of this resource is fieldN.menu.options.showUnselectable,
class MenuButton.SimpleMenu.Options.ShowUnselectable; where N is
replaced with the field number (starting with the left-most field numbered
0). The default is True for all but field 11 (average width of characters
in font) and False for field 11. If you never want to see unselectable
entries, '*menu.options.showUnselectable:False' is a reasonable thing to
specify in a resource file.
FILES¶
$XFILESEARCHPATH/XFontSel
SEE ALSO¶
xrdb(1),
xfd(1)
BUGS¶
Sufficiently ambiguous patterns can be misinterpreted and lead to an initial
selection string which may not correspond to what the user intended and which
may cause the initial sample text output to fail to match the proffered
string. Selecting any new field value will correct the sample output, though
possibly resulting in no matching font.
Should be able to return a FONT for the PRIMARY selection, not just a STRING.
Any change in a field value will cause
xfontsel to assert ownership of
the PRIMARY_FONT selection. Perhaps this should be parameterized.
When running on a slow machine, it is possible for the user to request a field
menu before the font names have been completely parsed. An error message
indicating a missing menu is printed to stderr but otherwise nothing bad (or
good) happens.
The average-width menu is too large to be useful.
COPYRIGHT¶
Copyright 1989, 1991, X Consortium
See
X(7) for a full statement of rights and permissions.
AUTHOR¶
Ralph R. Swick, Digital Equipment Corporation/MIT Project Athena
Mark Leisher <mleisher@crl.nmsu.edu> added the support for the UTF-8
sample text.