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; for example, -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, for example, xterm(1X)) 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 dehighlight
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 userinterface
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
<XRoot>/lib/X11/app-defaults/XFontSel, where <XRoot>
refers to the root of the X11 install tree.)
Application specific resources: Specifies the cursor for
the application window. 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; for example, "*-m-*" for
monospaced fonts. 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. 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. If True the currently selected font name is
printed to standard output when the quit button is activated.
Equivalent to the -print option. The sample 1-byte
text to use for linearly indexed fonts. Each glyph index
is a single byte, with newline separating lines. The sample
2-byte text to use for matrix-encoded fonts. Each
glyph index is two bytes, with a 1-byte newline separating
lines. If True then selection of arbitrary pixel and
point sizes for scalable fonts is enabled.
Widget specific resources: 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 leftmost
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
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, X Consortium
See X(1X) for a full statement of rights and permissions.
xrdb(1X), xfd(1X)
Ralph R. Swick, Digital Equipment Corporation/MIT Project
Athena
xfontsel(1X)
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