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How To Easily Create Font files

If you have a Linux and/or BSD system with an X server you probably already have a font server like xfs. You can use all the fonts available on this font server to create BDF files which you then can convert to the FNT format Rockbox prefers. The procedure is quite easy:

First, make sure you have a font server running. Common ones are xfs, xfs-xtt and xfstt. Usually they can be reached via a UNIX socket. On my Debian system, xfs waits for connections on unix:/7100. Other font servers may use unix:/7101 or something entirely different. If you do not have a font server, you can install one without having to install XFree86 or X.org. In Debian terms, you would do

apt-get install xfs

The tool to extract arbitrary fonts in BDF format is called fstobdf. Debian ships this program in the package xbase-clients. You can run it like this (one line):

fstobdf -s unix/:7100 -fn -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--13-120-75-75-c-70-iso8859-1 > fixed-12.bdf

The -s parameter must be followed by the address of your font server. The -fn parameter is followed by the name of the font you want to extract. You can get a list of all available fonts with xlsfonts (which is also part of the xbase-clients Debian package) or with graphical tools like xfontsel. As fstobdf prints the BDF file to stdout, you have to redirect its output to a file (in this case fixed-12.bdf).

Anyway, if you have created one or more BDF files, you can convert them with convbdf, which is shipped within the source files of Rockbox. Simply do

convbdf -f fixed-12.bdf

where obviously fixed-12.bdf is one of your newly created BDF files. Copy the resulting fixed-12.fnt into the .rockbox/fonts directory on your player and "run" it. Rockbox should now display your font. If it looks very small and not like you expected, something went wrong in the process and Rockbox chose its default font. Maybe you tried a font that Rockbox cannot display (see below).

Note on font selection

You can try different encodings, but beware that Rockbox does not yet support Unicode. Fonts larger than 14pt probably do not work either. Please also note that even though you may be able to extract TrueType fonts (like the beautiful Bitstream family), they will look very ugly when used in Rockbox because it doesn't support Anti-Aliasing. Previewing fonts with xfontsel is probably a good idea.

X fonts gallery

The Xfree86/Xorg server distribution source contains a lot of BDF files. A gallery of a lot of these, converted to Rockbox font format can be found here. There is a problem with some of the larger fonts, where some characters look strange, or don't work at all - if you know what's causing this (BDF files are available for download as well), please contact me (JonasHaeggqvist).

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Revision r1.4 - 06 Aug 2005 - 12:19 GMT - JonasHaeggqvist	Copyright © 1999-2005 by the contributing authors.