Index for Section 1X

Alphabetical listing for X

Bottom of page

xfontsel(1X)
X11R6
NAME
  xfontsel - point & click interface for selecting X11 font names

SYNOPSIS
  xfontsel [-toolkitoption...] [-pattern fontname] [-print] [-sample text]
  [-sample16 text16] [-noscaled]

DESCRIPTION
  The xfontsel application 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.

  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, -pattern
  *medium* will select that subset of fonts which 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.

  The -sample option specifies the sample text to be used to display the
  selected font if the font is linearly indexed, overriding the default.

  The -sample16 option specifies the sample text to be used to display the
  selected font if the font is matrix encoded, overriding the default.

  The -noscaled option 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.

INTERACTIONS
  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 (see, for example, xterm(1X))
  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. This then allows you to paste the string
  into other applications.  The select button remains highlighted to remind
  you of this fact, and de-highlights 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
  de-highlight the widget.  Activating the select widget twice is the only
  way to cause xfontsel to release the PRIMARY_FONT selection.

RESOURCES
  The application class is XFontSel.  Most of the user-interface is
  configured in the app-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 <XRoot>/lib/X11/app-defaults/XFontSel, where
  <XRoot> refers to the root of the X11 install tree.)

  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
      pixelSizeList contains 7, 30, 40, 50, and 60.

  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 pointSizeList contains 250, 300, 350, and
      400.

  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)
      The sample 1-byte text to use for linearly indexed fonts.	 Each glyph
      index is a single byte, with newline separating lines.

  sampleText16 (class Text16)
      The sample 2-byte text to use for matrix-encoded fonts. Each glyph
      index is two bytes, with a 1-byte newline separating lines.

  scaledFonts (class ScaledFonts)
      If True then selection of arbitrary pixel and point sizes for scalable
      fonts is enabled.

  Widget specific resources:

  showUnselectable (class ShowUnselectable)
      Specifies, for each field menu, 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. The full name of
      this resource is fieldN.menu.options.showUnselectable, class
      MenuButton.SimpleMenu.Options.ShowUnselectable; where N is replaced
      with the field number (starting with the left-most 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
  $XFILESEARCHPATH/XFontSel

BUGS
  Sufficiently ambiguous patterns can be misinterpreted and 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.

  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 stderr but otherwise
  nothing bad (or good) happens.

  The average-width menu is too large to be useful.

COPYRIGHT
  Copyright 1989, 1991,	 X Consortium

  See X(1X) for a full statement of rights and permissions.

SEE ALSO
  xrdb(1X), xfd(1X)

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

Index for Section 1X

Alphabetical listing for X

Top of page