Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bbn!mit-eddie!ll-xn!adelie!ora!adrian
From: adrian@ora.UUCP (Adrian Nye )
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: font names, xfd
Keywords: aliasing wildcars
Message-ID: <1313@ora.UUCP>
Date: 28 Nov 88 21:45:57 GMT
Organization: O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., Newton, MA
Lines: 32

I was surprised at first when I got an error trying to invoke xfd with one
of the font file names I saw in /usr/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi.
xfd said it couldn't find the font.
Then I realized that this is because of 
the new font aliasing.  The name you have to give xfd
is one of the aliases in the second 
column of fonts.dir in the directory 
containing the font.  Here is an example of a line from this file.

courBO10.snf     -adobe-courier-bold-o-normal--10-100-75-75-m-60-iso8859-1

The rub is that the alias is a little long to type comfortably :-).
I discovered that if you type the file name with wildcards
between the various parts, it seems to uniquely identify a
font.  For example, for the courier font shown above, you can
look at it with xfd using:

xfd "*cour*BO*10*"

I tried this for about 10 fonts, and it worked for all of them.
Now, my question to you is "why does this work?!"  It is not
matching the filename courBO10 because that name does 
not work by itself or with leading and trailing wildcards (*courBO10*).
There is no occurence of BO in the alias, so it is not matching that.

What is it matching? The matching algorithm folds upper to lower case!
So "BO" is actually "bo" and that is in the alias.
-- 
Adrian Nye (617) 527-4210
O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., Publishers of Nutshell Handbooks
981 Chestnut Street, Newton, MA 02164
UUCP:	uunet!ora!adrian   ARPA: adrian@ora.uu.net