karynk@spray.CalComp.COM (Karyn M. Kachinski) (06/14/88)
I have a question on fonts (related to xterm also):
We had some old fonts that were made for our company use. A utility was
written to convert these fonts to the correct format to be used with X. A
problem in the program caused the output .snf file to have the font and
each character's ascent to be set to the height of the font, and the descent
to be set to 0. Using the fonts seemed OK, until someone used it for xterm.
The application being run in the xterm window was using a database facility
that put up a form with underlines. Sections of single spaced lined areas
on the screen would be missing the underlines. Looking into this some more,
it turned out that the underline from the line above the current line was
being erased when the characters were put up on the current line. This was
due to the fact that xterm spaces its rows based on character height. The
font I was using was a 12x20 font, so each of the rows of characters (and
underlines) started 20 pixels apart.
What all this is leading to are these questions:
Is it correct for a text font to have characters with no descenters?
If it is, then would this font typically be used with xterm? If yes to this,
then should xterm be made to function in the case where a font is encountered
that has a value of 0 (zero) for descent; currently it does not.
The fonts I have seen with no descenters are usually symbols (for games
and such), and thus wouldn't be a font that would be used with xterm. We
did fix our conversion program, so our fonts now work correctly, but I'm
wondering if this is a bug that should be reported with xterm, or is not
likely to happen because all fonts used with xterm (text fonts) will always
have descenters.
Thanks for any info!
--
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