Font files

The formats

The primary font file format for the Linux Console Tools, as of version 0.2.x, is the PSF format, which is also used by kbd. 0.3.x will introduce the XPSF format, which will be able to replace all existing file formats.

Versions 0.2.x do not have support for the CP format again - this comes back in the 0.3.x development branch.

Tools

Font-files manipulation tools

The psfaddtable(1), psfgettable(1), and psfstriptable(1) tools are provided by the Linux Console Tools for manipulation of the SFM embedded in PSF files. These are the only font-file manipulation tools really provided by the Linux Console Tools as of version 0.2.x.

The font2psf(1) tool (written by Martin Lohner, SuSE GmbH) is available in the contrib directory of the Linux Console Tools source tree to convert old raw fonts into PSF fonts.

There are plans for a more generic font-conversion tool based on libcfont. It will be mostly trivial to write once work on libcfont will be advanced enough.

The only way provided by the Linux Console Tools to display a font's contents is to load it, and then to display it using showcfont(1).

Font editors

I do not curently know of a good font-editor suitable for editing console fonts. I tried fonter, but this one has a bad design flaw: you can only properly edit cp437 fonts (or maybe ASCII-based fonts if you like unreadable screens) because it works on the console and loads the font you are editing. I was told about cse which I did not tried yet. Marcin Kowalczyk is working on a tool in his fonty package (which I did not check yet either), which will help font designers, but AFAIK it is more a processor than a "real" (interactive) editor. Robert de Bath works on his own tools which handle a variety of file formats and table formats.