Re: incoming font engine update

["Vesa Jääskeläinen" <chaac@nic.fi>]

Vesa Jääskeläinen wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I am about to integrate Colin's new Font Engine with additional changes
> to gfxterm.
> 
> This means that current font tool chain will be obsolete and there will
> be new font commands to load fonts and so on. These will be detailed in
> more detail in later emails about the change. Side effects will be that
> font file format will change thus invaliding old fonts and it will
> affect font sizes too. Principal idea is to convert BDF fonts to GRUB 2
> fonts. Normally used GNU Unifont is already provided in BDF form.
> 
> This will open the needed path for GRUB 2 Graphical Menu developed by
> Colin. There are sill some patches that will need attention, but
> basically almost all ground work is after that ready.
> 
> Next I will do some cleanup for the patch and try to commit it withing
> couple of days.

Couple of days went and now patch finally went in. I have updated
gfxterm part of the wiki to match new font enngine:

http://grub.enbug.org/gfxterm

As a temporary workaround Java is being used to convert fonts. This
means that it would be wise to have Java SDK & VM installed when
executing make. During build process it looks for /usr/src/unifont.bdf
and if found converts it automatically to ascii.pf2 and unicode.pf2
(Previously those were ascii.pff and unicode.pff).

loadfont command can be used to load PF2 fonts.

lsfonts command can be used to list loaded fonts.

However there is a slight incompleteness in unifont.bdf that does not
feature name nor point size. And we get "Unknown -1" as a output for
default unifont.bdf font.

You are also free to experiment with other BDF fonts. gfxterm has been
updated to try make every font terminal compatible. It looks for every
ASCII font found and then determines default font width from there and
uses it to determine glyph spacing. When graphical menu is integrated in
there font spacing will be what ever is configured in glyphs.