Font names

The full name of a font is a string such as the following:

   -adobe-courier-bold-o-normal--10-100-75-75-m-60-iso8859-1
    1     2       3    4 5      6 7   8  9 10 11 12    13  14

A font name is comprised of 14 fields, with a hyphen (-) separating each field. The fields have the following meanings:

1. foundry that digitized and supplied the font

2. font family, based on standard typesetting names for various fonts. The major families include Charter, Courier, Helvetica, Lucida, Lucidabright, Lucidatypewriter, New Century Schoolbook, and Times.

3. font weight, usually ``bold'' or ``medium''

4. font slant, usually ``i'' for italic, ``o'' for oblique, or ``r'' for Roman.

5. font proportionate width, as set by the foundry. Most fonts use ``normal''; other possible values are ``condensed'', ``narrow'', and ``double width.''

6. add_style_name; used to provide additional information not covered in the rest of the font name, for example ``serif,'' or ``decorated.'' Typically this field is not used.

7. font size in pixels. This measurement depends on the resolution of the font. For example, if the font has a resolution of 100 dots per inch (dpi), a 12-point font has a pixel size of 17. If a font has a resolution of 75 dpi, there are fewer dots per pixel, so a 12-point font has a pixel size of 12.
   

8. font size in tenths of a point. A point is a printer's unit that measures 1/72 of an inch.

9. horizontal resolution in dots-per-inch

10. vertical resolution in dots-per-inch. Horizontal and vertical figures are required because a screen may have different capacities for horizontal and vertical resolution.

11. font spacing. The valid values are ``m'' for monofont (or fixed-width) and ``p'' for proportional.

12. average (mean) width of all characters in the font, measured in tenths of a pixel (60)

13. font character set registry. This specification refers to the ISO 8859 character set. The ASCII character set is a part of ISO 8859.

14. character set encoding. ``1'' is the Latin character set.

• Font names are case sensitive. Whenever you enter a font name, be sure to use the correct combination of upper- and lowercase letters.

• No spaces can be used anywhere in the font name, except when they are contained within the font family specification, in which case they must be enclosed in double quote characters.

• Terminal emulator clients (scoterm, xterm) require fixed-width (monofont) fonts. Most other clients can use either a fixed-width or a variable-width font, depending on your preference. Fixed-width fonts resemble the fonts used on non-graphics terminals, whereas variable-width fonts resemble the fonts used in typeset text.