MirBSD manpage: xfontsel(1)


XFONTSEL(1)         UNIX Programmer's Manual          XFONTSEL(1)

NAME

     xfontsel - point and click selection of X11 font names

SYNTAX

     xfontsel [-toolkitoption ...] [-pattern fontname] [-print]
     [-sample text] [-sample16 text16] [-sampleUCS textUCS] [-
     scaled]

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; e.g., ``-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 -sampleUCS option specifies the sample text encoded in
     the UTF-8 form to be used to display the selected font if
     the font has a CHARSET_REGISTRY of ISO10646, overriding the
     default.

     The -scaled option enables the ability to select scaled
     fonts at arbitrary pixel or point sizes.

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

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     the menu entirely as a configuration option; see the ShowUn-
     selectable resource, below. Whenever any change is made to a
     field value, xfontsel will assert ownership of the
     PRIMARY_FONT selection.  Other applications (see, e.g.,
     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. 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 stan-
     dard output and the resulting window will be nearly
     incomprehensible.

     Most of the significant parts of the widget hierarchy are
     documented in /usr/X11R6/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 sub-
             set of available fonts.  Equivalent to the -pattern
             option. Most useful patterns will contain at least
             one field delimiter; e.g. ``*-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

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             those pixel sizes. The default pixelSizeList con-
             tains 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 new-
             line 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 charac-
             ters in font) and False for field 11.  If you never
             want to see unselectable entries,
             '*menu.options.showUnselectable:False' is a reason-
             able thing to specify in a resource file.

FILES

      $XFILESEARCHPATH/XFontSel

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SEE ALSO

     xrdb(1), xfd(1)

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 out-
     put, 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 com-
     pletely 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(7) for a full statement of rights and permissions.

AUTHOR

     Ralph R. Swick, Digital Equipment Corporation/MIT Project
     Athena
     Mark Leisher <mleisher@crl.nmsu.edu> added the support for
     the UTF-8 sample text.

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