The Linux Console Tools

Implementing XPSF format

XPSF is my attempt at replacing the PSF file-format, which has several annoying limitations. XPSF is designed to be easily extensible, and will allow, amongst other features, to store fonts with a width different from 8 pixels, and store several related fonts in the same file (as does the CP format).

XPSF is currently in the final design stages. I'd like to cleanup the design document before starting implementation.

kbd 1.00 adds support for a version 2 of the PSF format. This format, supporting fonts of arbitrary width, makes less critical the need for XPSF, so this item is delayed in favor of more useful features.

Reading X11 Xkb files

Loadkeys would be more useful if it could take its input from the Xkb files (in /usr/lib/X11/xkb/). Xkb is the X Keyboard Extension, and defines keyboards in a very modular way.

This would remove the need for a lot of duplicated work on keymaps.

Adding support for all KDFONTOP operations

New kernels provide a KDFONTOP iotcl usable on console devices to do various things to fonts. Besides loading fonts of various width (ie. different from 8 - already supported though untested), it currently (2.2.11 kernel) allows to:

• Reload a default font, maybe specifying the name of a builtin font (KD_FONT_OP_SET_DEFAULT) NOTE: this has been implemented and shall be released soon
• Copying a font from another VC (KD_FONT_OP_COPY)

Tools to convert to/from various font-file formats

libcfont implements the low-level read/write operations on font-files. We mostly need a command-line wrapper. It will become more tricky when font_group's will be implemented (converting simple_font's to/from font_group's).

Localization (aka L10n)

Better pages