Font Dichotomy : Xstation vs console

[Daniel Packman]

The fonts available to the Xstation seem to reside in

   /usr/lpp/x_st_mgr/fonts

and the fonts included in the Xstation distribution is rather limited
compared with the system fonts (located in /usr/lpp/fonts).  I also notice
there is a program, /usr/lpp/x_st_mgr/bin/swapsnf that will convert the
system fonts (which work with showsnf) to the Xstation format.  So it
should be possible to convert system fonts to the required format for the
Xstation.  The questions that come to mind are:

 1. Why this design decision for two font formats?  Was this marketing
    reasoning that if you can afford Xstations, you can afford more
    disk space?  Was it driven by byte ordering in the Xstation cpu?
    Would it be possible to change this in the future?  Considering
    you allow several types of fonts of various "efficiencies" (bdf, snf,
    compressed snf, etc), one could view the Xstations as requiring just
    another filter (like uncompress).  More generally, one could set up
    an "xsnf" Xstation type snf file and people could taylor their system-wide
    font system to have the mix of font formats that their disk space and
    distribution of Xstations/consoles dictate for optimum efficiency.

 2. In the present case I am most interested in setting up the iso fonts
    for the Xstation. Is it true that for a 19" Xstation one only needs the
    75dpi fonts?  If so I should be able to create a subdirectory in the
    x_st_mgr directory, copy the 75dpi fonts, uncompress them, run them
    through swapsnf, and then optionally compress them again.  True?

 3. For work with DEC systems, there is a fonts.alias addition that was
    posted.  This seems to be a set of aliases for iso fonts.  This is
    supposed to be appended to an existing fonts.alias file.  Is it most
    proper to add this to the fonts.alias file in the 75dpi/100dpi directories?
    Or should it go in the top level directory?

Dan Packman     NCAR                             INTERNET: pack at ncar.UCAR.EDU
(303) 497-1427  P.O. Box 3000                       CSNET: pack at ncar.CSNET
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