Ubuntu Font Family

  1. Bug #724022
  2. Comment #0

Comment 0 for bug 724022

Revision history for this message
Paul Sladen (sladen) wrote : Wishlist: Enable use of Ubuntu Mono as .psf console-setup font

The text-mode console (Ctrl-Alt-F1) currently uses the default system/VGA font but a hinted version of Ubuntu Mono would be lovely to have loadable on the Linux console when it's finished.

Converting a TTF so that it is usable as bitmap Linux console font appears to be a two-stage process; first rasterising to a BFD bitmap font file (bitmap with metrics), and then from that into a rawform, equal width PSF bitmap console font:

  otf2bdf /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ubuntu-font-family/UbuntuBetaMono-R-R21.ttf > UbuntuBetaMono-R-R21.bdf
  bdf2psf UbuntuBetaMono-R-R21.bdf /usr/share/bdf2psf/standard.equivalents /usr/share/bdf2psf/required.set+/usr/share/bdf2psf/useful.set 256 UbuntuBetaMono-R-R21.psf
  setfont -h17 UbuntuBetaMono-R-R21.psf

The R21 Mono Beta has a cell bounding box of 482×1000 (including necessary leading and advance); this leads to bounding box of 8x17 rather than the traditional 8x16 and this is what the "-n17" forces upon loading. The result useful but very ugly because of the lack of manual hinting.

We probably also want to make sure that at least all of the codepoints listed in the 'required.set' file are present and populated if we're going to replace the current default.