[comp.windows.x] Do symbol fonts exist?

nowlin@gramian.harvard.edu (Bill Nowlin) (06/02/89)

As a graduate student in applied math, I find myself dealing a lot with
alphas and betas.  As a sometimes-programmer for the lab, I find myself
wanting to create programs that display these greek symbols.

I see that the standard public domain release of X11R3 has 2 greek fonts,
size 25pt and 30pt.  Ecch.  How about 9 ~ 14pt?

There are two ways I can be happy:

1) I find copies of fonts or am given them.
2) I create my own fonts using some font editor that I don't yet have.

Either way I think I'll have to use the fonts in some brute force manner
directly from my program, since I can't count on their existence on some
other system.  I have done something like that already to print rotated
text.  But that begs another question: What is the font file storage
format?

Any help will fetch a fair amount of genuflecting on my part!
Thanks in advance:

Bill Nowlin
Harvard Robotic Lab
nowlin@gramian.harvard.edu

janssen@titan.sw.mcc.com (Bill Janssen) (06/02/89)

In article <1985@husc6.harvard.edu>, nowlin@gramian (Bill Nowlin) writes:
>Either way I think I'll have to use the fonts in some brute force manner
>directly from my program, since I can't count on their existence on some
>other system.

This is an interesting point.  How does the application programmer name
a font that is guaranteed to exist?  The Andrew folks do it by distributing
a set of fonts, and calling xim_AddAndrewFontPath() to add them to the font
path when starting an application.  MCC DELI does it less safely by assuming
that there are three families that will always be present, and using
(xlib:list-font-names) to get the specific mappings from "*tim*", "*helv*",
and "*cour*".  I suppose that one could use (xlib:list-font-names) on
"*", to get some font (but then it might be a symbol font!).

What is the force behind, and status of, the font-naming conventions in
doc/fontnames/fnames.txt?  Are they something that all X Consortium
members have agreed to?  Are they only "suggested"?  Is there general
agreement that they are a good thing?

Bill