Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!pacbell!ames!amdcad!decwrl!karlton
From: karlton@decwrl.dec.com (Philip Karlton)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: font names, xfd
Message-ID: <945@bacchus.dec.com>
Date: 1 Dec 88 03:06:37 GMT
References: <1313@ora.UUCP> <8811291459.AA13065@EXPO.LCS.MIT.EDU>
Organization: DEC Western Research Lab
Lines: 33

In article <8811291459.AA13065@EXPO.LCS.MIT.EDU> jim@EXPO.LCS.MIT.EDU (Jim Fulton) writes:
>
>> [questions on font *file* names]
>
>[some good stuff explaining the difference between font and file names]
>
>This allows you to specify only the
>fields that are important to you.  For example, if you wanted to use a
>12 point "roman" Courier font for an xterm, you could use the either of
>the following
>names:
>
>	-adobe-courier-medium-r-normal--12-120-75-75-m-70-iso8859-1
>	*-courier-*-r-*-120-*
>

You have to be a little more careful than this when specifying font names. For
instance, the second string above would also match any courier font at 120 dpi
if it happened to be in your font path. A more common collision happens when
you try to specify a 10 point (i.e. 100 deci-point) high font and you end up
getting some random point size from the 100 dpi set.

The fields are positional in the sense that there are a fixed number of
hyphens in all fonts that are named in compliance with the convention. Picking
the name

	*-*-courier-*-r-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1

would pick a font that was 12.0 points high at the appropriate screen
resoulution (assuming your font path is set up correctly) and with the
encoding you are probably expecting.

PK