# GNOME Font Selector Manual

2000
Alexander Kirillov

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. You may obtain a copy of the GNU Free Documentation License from the Free Software Foundation by visiting their Web site or by writing to: Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.

Many of the names used by companies to distinguish their products and services are claimed as trademarks. Where those names appear in any GNOME documentation, and those trademarks are made aware to the members of the GNOME Documentation Project, the names have been printed in caps or initial caps.

## Introduction

GNOME Font selector is a simple utility for choosing a screen (i.e. X Window System) font. It is included in gnome-utils package, which is a part of GNOME environment. This manual describes version &version; of GNOME Font selector.

GNOME Font selector is usually launched when you are changing an application's font in a Settings or Preferences dialog. It can also be launched from the main menu by selecting Font Selector item in the Utilities submenu of the Main Menu, or from the command line by running command `gfontsel`.

It is important to know that in X Window System, each font has a number of attributes, such as family (Helvetica, Times, Courier…), size, weight, slant, etc., and two fonts are considered different even if they only differ in one of the properties, such as size or weight: Helvetica 10 point, Helvetica 12 point, and Helvetica 10 point bold are considered as different fonts. Each font has a unique name (officially known as X Logical Font Description, or XLFD), which includes the values of all font's attributes, and by necessity is very long. Detailed description of X Window System fonts, their attributes and names can be found in .

## Main window

This window (labelled Font) is the main window used for choosing the font. It is shown in .

### GNOME Font Selector

GNOME Font Selector - Main Window

### Basic usage

To choose a font, select the font family (for example, courier) in the left column, then select font style—that is, weight and slant (for example, bold italic), and finally, font size.

The Preview window will show you what the selected font looks like. By default, it shows the Latin alphabet; you can also type any text you like in this window, and it will be shown using the selected font.

To find more information about the selected font, you can switch to the Font information window.

If the font selector utility was launched by some application, such as one of the preferences dialogs, you will have buttons OK and Cancel at the bottom of the window. After you are satisfied with the chosen font, you can press OK and the name of the selected font will be returned to the launching application.

If the font selector utility was started from the menu or from the command line, it will have buttons Apply and Close. Pressing Apply button will copy the full name (XLFD) of the selected font to the clipboard, so that it can be pasted into any other area of the screen by pressing the middle mouse button. Pressing Apply button also shows the name of the selected font in the Selection field at the top of the screen.

### Finer points

If there are several fonts with the same family name, the font foundry (usually the vendor name) will also be shown in the left field, for example: courier(adobe), courier(bitstream).

Font Style field shows more than just font weight and slant. Namely, it also shows font's spacing, which can be monospaced ([M]), character-cell ([C]), or proportional (no label). In monospaced and character-cell fonts, each character has the same width; in proportional fonts, the character width varies, which usually looks better.

#### Warning

Unfortunately, terminal emulation programs (including xterm and gnome-terminal) and many programs initially designed to work in a terminal (such as emacs editor) can only properly display monospaced and character cell fonts.

Finally, Font Style field also shows all possible character sets available for given font (if there is more than one). Roughly speaking, character set describes symbols of what alphabet are shown in this font. The most common charset is `iso8859-1`, which includes all Latin letters, punctuation marks, numbers and enough accented letters to cover majority of Western European languages. More information is given in .

You will also notice that in the Size field, some font sizes are marked with stars. These are the sizes of unscaled bitmap fonts; they usually look better than other type (scalable and scaled bitmap) fonts — see .

You can configure the font selector dialog to show only those fonts which meet certain criteria. This is done in the Filter window. If you later decide that you again want to see all the fonts, just press the button Reset Filter either in the main window or in the filter window.

## Font Information window

This window shows the information about selected font, both the values you requested and actual values. This is useful if you want to check the values of some of the font's parameters which you can not specify in the main window, such as screen resolution. This window also shows the full font name (XLFD), which contains the same information.

## Filter window

In this window, you can set the font selector to show only the fonts which satisfy some criteria. You can specify values for font foundry (vendor), weight, character set, slant, set width, and spacing (see for description of these and other font parameters). You can choose *, which means any value; you can also specify several values for the same field: just click on several of the them with the left mouse button (you do not need to hold SHIFT or CTRL).

### Filter window

GNOME Font Selector - Filter Window

You can also specify allowed font types, using checkbuttons at the top of this window. Possible types are bitmap fonts, scalable fonts, and scaled bitmaps. The most common fonts are bitmap fonts; scalable fonts (TrueType and Type 1 PostScript) usually produce equally good quality, but not all implementations of X Window System are able to use them.

As the name shows, scalable fonts can be scaled to any size without loss of quality. While it is possible to scale bitmap fonts as well, the quality of scaled bitmap fonts is disastrous. For this reason, by default font selector does not show scaled bitmap fonts.

After you have set your filter, you can return to the main window (do not press OK or Apply — just choose the tab Font), which will now only show the fonts satisfying your criteria. To remind you about this, the main window will now show words Filter applied.

To return to the default filter (i.e., show all possible fonts except for scaled bitmaps), press Reset Filter either in the Filter window or in the main window.

## Font attributes in X Window System and XLFD

As was said earlier, each font in X Window system has a number of attributes and a full name, also known as X Logical Font Description (XLFD), which lists all of these attributes and therefore is quite long. Typical font name looks like this

    	  -adobe-courier-medium-r-normal--12-120-75-75-m-70-iso8859-1

This name consists of 14 fields, showing the values of 14 parameters of the font, separated by dashes.

While such a name gives a complete information about the font, it is somewhat overwhelming, especially since not all of this parameters are actually useful. To make life a little bit easier, you can use wildcard * in the font name; for example, the previous font can also be referred to as

    	  -adobe-courier-medium-r-*-*-12-*-*-*-*-*-*-*

As usual, * matches any value; if there are several fonts matching the given name, the system will pick the first matching one. In this particular example, most probably there is only one font matching this name, so this name is unambiguous.

Below we list those of the font's 14 attributes which are actually useful:

- foundry — font foundry, the company or individual which made the font (in our example, `adobe`)

- family — font family, the popular nickname of the font (in our example, `courier`)

- weight — font weight (in our example, `medium`). Admissible values: bold, medium, etc.

- slant — font slant (in our example, `(r)oman`, i.e. unslanted). Admissible values: (i)talics, (o)blique, (r)roman, etc.

- pixelsize — the number of pixels vertically in a character (in our example, 12)

- pointsize — approximate point size of the font, measured in tenths of a point. In the example above, point size is 120, that is, 12 points. One point is equal to 1/72 of an inch, which is the common convention in English and American typesetting.

- horizontal and vertical resolutions in dots per inch — in the example above, both are 75 dpi.

  Note that point size, pixel size, and vertical resolution are related: for fonts with resolution 75dpi, point size is approximately equal to (pixel size)*10; for fonts with resolution 100dpi, point size is approximately equal to (pixel size)*7.

- spacing — describes variance of character sizes in the font. Allowed values are (m)onospaced, (c)haracter cell (in both of these spacings, all characters have the same width) and proportional (characters have varying sizes). Proportional fonts usually look nicer.

- character set registry and encoding — these two parameters, commonly referred to as character set, or charset for short, describe what set of symbols (or what alphabet) this font represents. There is a number of possible charsets. Some of the most popular ones include:

  - iso8859-1, also known as Latin 1 — this character set includes all the symbols found on the keyboard, i.e. Latin letters, punctuation marks, numbers, symbols such as @ or $. It also includes some special symbols, such as the copyright sign, and a number of accented letters, thus covering the needs of most Western European languages (to be precise, Afrikaans, Basque, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, English, Faeroese, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Icelandic, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Scottish, Spanish, and Swedish).

  - iso8859-7 — includes Latin and Greek alphabets

  - iso8859-8 — includes Latin and Hebrew alphabets

  - koi8-r — includes Latin and Cyrillic alphabets

  - big5.eten.3.10-1 — Chinese (Big5 encoding)

  - gb2312.1980-0 — Chinese (GB encoding)

  - jisx0208.1983-0 — Japanese

The remaining font attributes (Set Width, Additional Style, and Average Width) are rarely used and therefore we skip their description.

Full XLFD specifications are included in technical documentation for the X Window system and can be found online at ftp://ftp.x.org/pub/R6.4/xc/doc/hardcopy/XLFD; most probably, you will never need it.

## Authors

GNOME Font Selector was written by Andrew Veliath (andrewtv@usa.net) with the help of many other GNOME developers. Please send all comments, suggestions, and bug reports to the GNOME bug tracking database. (Instructions for submitting bug reports can be found on-line.) You can also use Bug Report Tool (`bug-buddy`), available in the Utilities submenu of Main Menu, for submitting bug reports.

This manual was written by Alexander Kirillov (kirillov@math.sunysb.edu). Please send all comments and suggestions regarding this manual to the GNOME Documentation Project by sending an email to docs@gnome.org. You can also add your comments online by using the GNOME Documentation Status Table.

## License

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

A copy of the GNU General Public License is included as an appendix to the GNOME Users Guide. You may also obtain a copy of the GNU General Public License from the Free Software Foundation by visiting their Web site or by writing to

        Free Software Foundation, Inc.
        59 Temple Place - Suite 330
        Boston, MA 02111-1307
        USA