Fonts

This page is dedicated to fonts, or the typeface.

There is a difference between the Console Font and the Terminal Font. You should only change the latter, which I will discuss later in this article.

Console Fonts

⛔ DO NOT CHANGE THIS! This section just explains how it is done. This section can also be useful to undo mistakes. See Terminal Fonts for the stuff that is OK to change.

While it is possible to change the font of the terminal (and by "terminal" that I mean the raw terminal, or console, that is not in some terminal emulator program like urxvt ), changing these settings is NOT recommended. However, knowing about how to manipulated still is useful.

The default console settings can be found in /etc/default/console-setup. The file looks something like this.

# CONFIGURATION FILE FOR SETUPCON

# Consult the console-setup(5) manual page.

ACTIVE_CONSOLES="/dev/tty[1-6]"

CHARMAP="UTF-8"

CODESET="guess"
FONTFACE=""
FONTSIZE=""

VIDEOMODE=

# The following is an example how to use a braille font
# FONT='lat9w-08.psf.gz brl-8x8.psf'

Editing that file is one way, but since it is in /etc/default it's probably not a good idea. The proper file to edit is /usr/share/console-setup/console-setup where that file looks more like this.

# CONFIGURATION FILE FOR SETUPCON

# Consult the console-setup(5) manual page.

ACTIVE_CONSOLES=guess

CHARMAP=guess

CODESET=guess
FONTFACE=TerminusBold
FONTSIZE=16

VIDEOMODE=

# The following is an example how to use a braille font
# FONT='lat9w-08.psf.gz brl-8x8.psf'

There is also the setfont Where you could do something like this.

setfont /usr/share/consolefonts/Lat7-Terminus28x14.psf

As you can see from this path, some of our console fonts are located at /usr/share/consolefonts, however just about all of them end with .psf.gz instead of .psf like in the example. So, I guess it is safe to assume that if you would do something like that, exclude the .gz part. I'm also going to assume you should add sudo before setfont in the previous command listed as this next way will certainly require it.

sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup

In this method, we see a dialog setup much like raspi-config where we are asked a series of questions.

1. Encoding to use on this console: UTF-8
2. Character set to support: Guess optimal character set
3. Font for the console: Do not change the boot/kernel font

The default boot/kernel font is TerminusBold.

To see the list of characters available, type sudo showconsolefont. For an ASCII table, try using man ascii.

Terminal Fonts

If you are going to change the font, change it for the Terminal Emulator program you are using. You have access to the console, but you are in an environment were it is safe to manipulate fonts. I'll go into detail with that in the urxvt article where we will also change the settings for colors too.

Where are the fonts?

From what I gather, the fonts can be located at any one of these placed on your system, but they should be installed with a program. A "drag-n-drop" procedure could have consequences.

/usr/share/consolefonts/          # Where the console fonts are stored. Generally .psf.gz files.
/usr/share/figlet/                # Not really fonts, but used by Figlet and Toilet to make ASCII Art text fonts. .tlf files.
/usr/share/fonts/
/usr/share/fonts/cmap/
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/                         # TrueType Fonts (.ttf)
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/                  #   DejaVuSans, DejaVuSansCondensed, DejaVuSansMono, DejaVuSerif, DejaVuSerifCondensed
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/droid/                   #   Droid, DroidSans, DroidSerif
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/freefont/                #   FreeMono, FreeSans, FreeSerif
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/gentium-basic/           #   Gentium?
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/openoffice/              #   opens___?
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/roboto/                  #   Roboto, RobotoCondensed
/usr/share/fonts/type1/
/usr/share/fonts/type1/gsfonts/                    # GhostScript fonts (.afm, .pfm)
/usr/share/fonts/type1/texlive-fonts-recommended/  # TexLive fonts. These are softlinks to the ones in the TeXLive folder
/usr/share/fonts/X11/
/usr/share/poppler/
/usr/share/poppler/cMap/

There are other directories. I'll probably list them later.

Where should I put fonts if I want to install them?

Generally, user installed fonts go in /usr/local/share/fonts/.

Which fonts should I install?

🔧 TODO: Add more font packages to this list.

sudo apt-get install these packages.

fonts-liberation                  # Fonts with the same metrics as Times, Arial, and Courier
ttf-mscorefonts-installer         # Installer for Microsoft TrueType core fonts

Other stuff to try

Show the font paths

$ xset q | sed -n -e '/Font Path/,+1p' | sed -n -e 's/,/\n  /g;p'  # two spaces in that secnd sed command

fc-scan

fc-cache

fc-list

See Also

• urxvt
• [toilet](Linux Toys)

Related Links

• https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fonts