NAME

xfontsel − point-and-click interface for selecting display font names. 

SYNTAX

xfontsel [options]

DESCRIPTION

xfontsel provides a simple way to display the fonts known to your X server, examine samples of each, and retrieve the X Logical Font Description (XLFD) full name for a font.  (See Chapter 6, Font Specification, for instructions on using xfontsel.) 

If -pattern is not specified, all fonts with XLFD 14-part names will be selectable.  To work with only a subset of the fonts, specify -pattern followed by a partially or fully qualified font name.  For example, % xfontsel -pattern ’∗medium∗’ & will select the subset of fonts that contain the string medium somewhere in their font name.  Be careful about escaping wildcard characters in your shell. 

If -print is specified on the command line, the selected font specifier will be written to standard output when the quit button is activated.  Regardless of whether or not -print was specified, the font specifier may be made the PRIMARY text selection by activating the select button. 

xfontsel handles scalable fonts as of Release 5.  See -noscaled under "Options" later in this reference page and Chapter 6, Font Specification, for more information. 

Clicking any pointer button in one of the XLFD field names will pop up a menu of the currently known possibilities for that field.  If previous choices of other fields were made, only values for fonts which matched the previously selected fields will be selectable; to make other values selectable, you must deselect some other field(s) by choosing the "∗" entry in that field.  Unselectable values may be omitted from the menu entirely as a configuration option; see the ShowUnselectable resource, below.  Whenever any change is made to a field value, xfontsel will assert ownership of the PRIMARY_FONT selection.  Other applications (such as xterm) may then retrieve the selected font specification. 

Scalable fonts come back from the server with zero for the pixel size, point size, and average width fields.  Selecting a font name with a zero in these positions results in an implementation-dependent size.  Any pixel or point size can be selected to scale the font to a particular size.  Any average width can be selected to anamorphically scale the font (although you may find this challenging given the size of the average width menu). 

Clicking the left pointer button in the select widget will cause the currently selected font name to become the PRIMARY text selection as well as the PRIMARY_FONT selection.  Then you can paste the string into other applications.  The select button remains highlighted to remind you of this fact, and dehighlights when some other application takes the PRIMARY selection away.  The select widget is a toggle; pressing it when it is highlighted will cause xfontsel to release the selection ownership and dehighlight the widget.  Activating the select widget twice is the only way to cause xfontsel to release the PRIMARY_FONT selection. 

OPTIONS

xfontsel accepts all of the standard X Toolkit command-line options, which are listed on the X reference page.  In addition, xfontsel accepts the following application-specific options:

-noscaled
Disables the ability to select scaled fonts at arbitrary pixel or point sizes.  This makes it clear which bitmap sizes are advertised by the server, and can avoid an accidental and sometimes prolonged wait for a font to be scaled.  (Available as of Release 5.)

-pattern fontname
Specifies a subset of the available fonts, those with names that contain fontname, which can be a partial or full name. 

-printSpecifies that the selected font will be written to standard output when the quit button is activated. 

-sample text
Specifies the sample text to be used to display the selected font if the font is linearly indexed, overriding the default (the alphabetic characters; and the digits 0 through 9, if the character set includes them). 

-sample16 text
Specifies the sample text to be used to display the selected font if the font is matrix encoded, overriding the default (see -sample). (Available as of Release 5.) 

RESOURCES

The application class is XFontSel.  Most of the user interface is configured in the application defaults file; if this file is missing, a warning message will be printed to standard output and the resulting window will be nearly incomprehensible. 

Most of the significant parts of the widget hierarchy are documented in the app-defaults file (normally /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/XFontSel). 

Application-specific resources:

cursor (class Cursor)
Specifies the cursor for the application window.

pattern (class Pattern)
Specifies the font name pattern for selecting a subset of available fonts.  Equivalent to the -pattern option.  Most useful patterns will contain at least one field delimiter, for example, ∗-m-∗ for monospaced fonts. 

pixelSizeList (class PixelSizeList)
Specifies a list of pixel sizes to add to the pixel size menu, so that scalable fonts can be selected at those pixel sizes. The default list contains 7, 30, 40, 50, and 60.  (Available as of Release 5.)

pointSizeList (class PointSizeList)
Specifies a list of point sizes (in units of tenths of points) to add to the point size menu, so that scalable fonts can be selected at those point sizes.  The default list contains 250, 300, 350, and 400. (Available as of Release 5.)

printOnQuit (class PrintOnQuit)
If True, the currently selected font name is printed to standard output when the quit button is activated.  Equivalent to the -print option. 

sampleText (class Text)
Specifies the sample one-byte text to use for linearly indexed fonts. Each glyph index is a single byte, with a newline character separating lines. (Available as of Release 5.)

sampleText16 (class Text16)
Specifies the sample two-byte text to use for matrix-encoded fonts. Each glyph index is two bytes, with a one-byte newline character separating lines.  (Available as of Release 5.)

scaledFonts (class ScaledFonts)
The default value of True enables selection of arbitrary pixel and point sizes for scalable fonts.  (Available as of Release 5.) 

Widget-specific resources:

showUnselectable (class ShowUnselectable)
For each field menu, specifies whether or not to show values that are not currently selectable, based upon previous field selections. If shown, the unselectable values are clearly identified as such and do not highlight when the pointer is moved down the menu. fieldN.menu.options.showUnselectable is the full instance name of this resource, while MenuButton.SimpleMenu.Options.ShowUnselectable is the full class name.  In both cases, N is replaced with the field number (starting with the leftmost field numbered 0).  The default is True for all but field 11 (average width of characters in font) and False for field 11.  If you never want to see unselectable entries, ∗menu.options.showUnselectable: False is a reasonable thing to specify in a resource file. 

FILES

/usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/XFontSel
Specifies default resources.

SEE ALSO

xfd, xrdb; Chapter 6, Font Specification. 

BUGS

Sufficiently ambiguous patterns can be misinterpreted and can lead to an initial selection string which may not correspond to what the user intended and which may cause the initial sample text output to fail to match the proffered string.  Selecting any new field value will correct the sample output, though possibly resulting in no matching font. 

The average width menu may be too long to be useful.  (It may extend beyond the bounds of the screen.) 

xfontsel should be able to return a font for the PRIMARY selection, not just a string. 

Any change in a field value will cause xfontsel to assert ownership of the PRIMARY_FONT selection.  Perhaps this should be parameterized. 

When running on a slow machine, it is possible for the user to request a field menu before the font names have been completely parsed.  An error message indicating a missing menu is printed to standard error, but otherwise nothing happens. 

AUTHOR

Ralph R. Swick, Digital Equipment Corporation/MIT Project Athena.