xfontsel(1) manual page
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xfontsel - point & click interface for selecting X11 font names
xfontsel
[ -toolkitoption... ] [ -pattern fontname ] [ -print ] [ -sample text ] [ -sample16
text16 ] [ -noscaled ]
The xfontsel application provides a simple
way to display the fonts known to your X server, examine samples of each,
and retrieve the X Logical Font Description ("XLFD") full name for a font.
If -pattern is not specified, all fonts with XLFD 14-part names will be selectable.
To work with only a subset of the fonts, specify -pattern followed by a
partially or fully qualified font name; e.g., ‘‘-pattern *medium*’’ will select
that subset of fonts which contain the string ‘‘medium’’ somewhere in their
font name. Be careful about escaping wildcard characters in your shell.
If -print is specified on the command line the selected font specifier will
be written to standard output when the quit button is activated. Regardless
of whether or not -print was specified, the font specifier may be made the
PRIMARY (text) selection by activating the select button.
The -sample option
specifies the sample text to be used to display the selected font if the
font is linearly indexed, overriding the default.
The -sample16 option specifies
the sample text to be used to display the selected font if the font is
matrix encoded, overriding the default.
The -noscaled option disables the
ability to select scaled fonts at arbitrary pixel or point sizes. This
makes it clear which bitmap sizes are advertised by the server, and can
avoid an accidental and sometimes prolonged wait for a font to be scaled.
Clicking any pointer button in one of the XLFD field names
will pop up a menu of the currently-known possibilities for that field.
If previous choices of other fields were made, only values for fonts which
matched the previously selected fields will be selectable; to make other
values selectable, you must deselect some other field(s) by choosing the
‘‘*’’ entry in that field. Unselectable values may be omitted from the menu
entirely as a configuration option; see the ShowUnselectable resource,
below. Whenever any change is made to a field value, xfontsel will assert
ownership of the PRIMARY_FONT selection. Other applications (see, e.g.,
xterm(1)
) may then retrieve the selected font specification.
Scalable fonts
come back from the server with zero for the pixel size, point size, and
average width fields. Selecting a font name with a zero in these positions
results in an implementation-dependent size. Any pixel or point size can
be selected to scale the font to a particular size. Any average width can
be selected to anamorphically scale the font (although you may find this
challenging given the size of the average width menu).
Clicking the left
pointer button in the select widget will cause the currently selected font
name to become the PRIMARY text selection as well as the PRIMARY_FONT selection.
This then allows you to paste the string into other applications. The select
button remains highlighted to remind you of this fact, and de-highlights
when some other application takes the PRIMARY selection away. The select
widget is a toggle; pressing it when it is highlighted will cause xfontsel
to release the selection ownership and de-highlight the widget. Activating
the select widget twice is the only way to cause xfontsel to release the
PRIMARY_FONT selection.
The application class is XFontSel. Most
of the user-interface is configured in the app-defaults file; if this file
is missing a warning message will be printed to standard output and the
resulting window will be nearly incomprehensible.
Most of the significant
parts of the widget hierarchy are documented in the app-defaults file (normally
/usr/openwin/lib/app-defaults/XFontSel).
Application specific resources:
- cursor (class Cursor)
- Specifies the cursor for the application window.
- pattern
(class Pattern)
- Specifies the font name pattern for selecting a subset
of available fonts. Equivalent to the -pattern option. Most useful patterns
will contain at least one field delimiter; e.g. ‘‘*-m-*’’ for monospaced fonts.
- pixelSizeList (class PixelSizeList)
- Specifies a list of pixel sizes to
add to the pixel size menu, so that scalable fonts can be selected at those
pixel sizes. The default pixelSizeList contains 7, 30, 40, 50, and 60.
- pointSizeList
(class PointSizeList)
- Specifies a list of point sizes (in units of tenths
of points) to add to the point size menu, so that scalable fonts can be
selected at those point sizes. The default pointSizeList contains 250,
300, 350, and 400.
- printOnQuit (class PrintOnQuit)
- If True the currently
selected font name is printed to standard output when the quit button is
activated. Equivalent to the -print option.
- sampleText (class Text)
- The sample
1-byte text to use for linearly indexed fonts. Each glyph index is a single
byte, with newline separating lines.
- sampleText16 (class Text16)
- The sample
2-byte text to use for matrix-encoded fonts. Each glyph index is two bytes,
with a 1-byte newline separating lines.
- scaledFonts (class ScaledFonts)
- If
True then selection of arbitrary pixel and point sizes for scalable fonts
is enabled.
Widget specific resources:
- showUnselectable (class ShowUnselectable)
- Specifies, for each field menu, whether or not to show values that are
not currently selectable, based upon previous field selections. If shown,
the unselectable values are clearly identified as such and do not highlight
when the pointer is moved down the menu. The full name of this resource
is fieldN.menu.options.showUnselectable, class MenuButton.SimpleMenu.Options.ShowUnselectable;
where N is replaced with the field number (starting with the left-most field
numbered 0). The default is True for all but field 11 (average width of
characters in font) and False for field 11. If you never want to see unselectable
entries, ’*menu.options.showUnselectable:False’ is a reasonable thing to specify
in a resource file.
$XFILESEARCHPATH/XFontSel
xrdb(1)
, xfd(1)
Sufficiently ambiguous patterns can be misinterpreted
and lead to an initial selection string which may not correspond to what
the user intended and which may cause the initial sample text output to
fail to match the proffered string. Selecting any new field value will
correct the sample output, though possibly resulting in no matching font.
Should be able to return a FONT for the PRIMARY selection, not just a STRING.
Any change in a field value will cause xfontsel to assert ownership of
the PRIMARY_FONT selection. Perhaps this should be parameterized.
When running
on a slow machine, it is possible for the user to request a field menu
before the font names have been completely parsed. An error message indicating
a missing menu is printed to stderr but otherwise nothing bad (or good)
happens.
The average-width menu is too large to be useful.
Copyright
1989, 1991 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
See X11(7)
for a full statement of rights and permissions.
Ralph R.
Swick, Digital Equipment Corporation/MIT Project Athena
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