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The traditionally used font collection for the Linux console is a demonstration for the big mess. There are many different fonts and nobody in the world knew the exact purpose of all of them. During the years new fonts were added, but old were almost newer removed.
Some of the fonts shared common typeface, i.e. they were differently encoded but the common glyphs were equal. In total, however, there were too many different typefaces that generally differ one from another only a little.
In order to resolve this mess the old console fonts were converted to BDF format.
In order to reduce the total number of fonts, they were converted to BDF
format. During the conversion of the fonts, only one BDF font was generated
for a group of fonts that share common typeface. Console fonts that didn't
have embedded Unicode table were simply ignored. The fonts
LatArCyrHeb* were also ignored - partialy due to technical reasons
and partialy because the other BDF fonts are better source for making Unicode
console fonts.
The resulting BDF fonts are named after the scheme
legacyNNp.bdf, where NN is 8, 10, 12, 14, 16
or 19 (the number of scan lines of the font, i.e. the font matrix is
8xNN) and p is a, b, c, d, e,... and serves to ensure the
uniqueness of the file names. Some of the resulting BDF fonts were produced by
only one source PSF font (for example only iso06.f08.psf was used
to produce legacy8d.bdf) while for others it was possible to
incorporate the glyphs from more than one PSF font (for example six different
PSF fonts were used to produce legacy16e.bdf).
The following table documents the correspondence between the file names of the resulting BDF fonts and the names of the original PSF fonts:
legacy8a.bdf: cp857-8x8.psf iso01.f08.psf iso05.f08.psf iso07.f08.psf iso09.f08.psf
legacy8b.bdf: Cyr_a8x8.psf koi8u_8x8.psf ruscii_8x8.psf
legacy8c.bdf: iso02.f08.psf iso03.f08.psf iso04.f08.psf iso10.f08.psf
legacy8d.bdf: iso06.f08.psf
legacy8e.bdf: iso08.f08.psf
legacy8f.bdf: lat0-08.psf lat9u-08.psf
legacy8g.bdf: lat1-08.psf lat1u-08.psf lat9v-08.psf lat9w-08.psf
legacy8h.bdf: lat2u-08.psf
legacy8i.bdf: lat4-08.psf lat4a-08.psf lat4u-08.psf
legacy10a.bdf: lat4-10.psf lat4a-10.psf lat4u-10.psf
legacy10b.bdf: lat0-10.psf lat9u-10.psf
legacy10c.bdf: lat1-10.psf lat1u-10.psf lat9v-10.psf lat9w-10.psf
legacy10d.bdf: lat2u-10.psf
legacy12a.bdf: lat0-12.psf lat9u-12.psf
legacy12b.bdf: lat1-12.psf lat1u-12.psf lat9v-12.psf lat9w-12.psf
legacy12c.bdf: lat2u-12.psf
legacy12d.bdf: lat4-12.psf lat4a-12.psf lat4u-12.psf
legacy14a.bdf: cp857-8x14.psf iso01.f14.psf iso05.f14.psf iso09.f14.psf
legacy14b.bdf: Cyr_a8x14.psf
legacy14c.bdf: koi8u_8x14.psf
legacy14d.bdf: ruscii_8x14.psf
legacy14e.bdf: iso02.f14.psf iso03.f14.psf iso04.f14.psf iso10.f14.psf
legacy14f.bdf: iso06.f14.psf
legacy14g.bdf: iso07.f14.psf
legacy14h.bdf: iso08.f14.psf
legacy14i.bdf: lat0-14.psf lat9u-14.psf
legacy14j.bdf: lat1-14.psf lat1u-14.psf lat9v-14.psf lat9w-14.psf
legacy14k.bdf: lat2u-14.psf
legacy14l.bdf: lat4-14.psf lat4a-14.psf lat4u-14.psf
legacy16a.bdf: cp857-8x16.psf iso01.f16.psf iso05.f16.psf iso07.f16.psf iso09.f16.psf
legacy16b.bdf: Cyr_a8x16.psf koi8u_8x16.psf ruscii_8x16.psf
legacy16c.bdf: default8x16.psf lat0-sun16.psf lat2-sun16.psf
legacy16d.bdf: viscii10-8x16.psf
legacy16e.bdf: iso02.f16.psf iso02g.psf iso03.f16.psf iso03g.psf iso04.f16.psf iso10.f16.psf lat2u-16.psf
legacy16f.bdf: iso06.f16.psf
legacy16g.bdf: iso08.f16.psf
legacy16h.bdf: iso14.f16.psf
legacy16i.bdf: lat0-16.psf lat9u-16.psf
legacy16j.bdf: lat1-16.psf lat1u-16.psf
legacy16k.bdf: lat4-16.psf lat4a-16.psf lat4u-16.psf
legacy16l.bdf: lat9v-16.psf lat9w-16.psf
legacy16m.bdf: lat4-16+.psf lat4a-16+.psf lat4u-16+.psf
legacy19a.bdf: lat4-19.psf lat4a-19.psf lat4u-19.psf
Goha12.bdf: Goha-12.psf
Goha14.bdf: Goha-14.psf
Goha16.bdf: Goha-16.psf
GohaClasic12.bdf: GohaClasic-12.psf
GohaClasic14.bdf: GohaClasic-14.psf
GohaClasic16.bdf: GohaClasic-16.psf
Only one PSF font per combination of charset-size is generated from the legacy
fonts. This font is named after the scheme
CHARSET-vgaSIZE.psf. For example
Greek-vga14.psf is the legacy font for Greek character set and
size 14. The list of BDF fonts that is used to produce Greek-vga14.psf was
determined as folows.
First, see which one of the legacy BDF fonts can provide as many glyphs for
Greek-vga14.psf as possible. This was legacy14g.bdf
(produced from iso07.f14.psf). Then see which one of the other
legacy BDF fonts provides as much glyphs for Greek-vga14.psf that
legacy14g does not provide. And so on. The resulting lists are
represented as Charset-legacySIZE-BDFS
targets in the Makefile. It is perfectly OK to handtune them.
For example if one decides that the look of legacy16i.bdf is
superior it is OK to list legacy16i.bdf as primary font for
Lat15-vga16.psf even though legacy16c.bdf provides
more glyphs.
There is one exception to the previous paragraph: the wonderful font
UNI_VGA of Dmitry Bolkhovityanov was always used as a primary font
for the vga16 fontface.
The targets VGASIZE-CHARSET in the
Makefile specify which charsets are suitable for a particular font
size. We see that for some of the sizes only the Lat15 and Lat2 charsets are
supported by the traditional fonts. The following charsets are completely
unsupported by the traditional console fonts: Armenian, CyrAsia, Georgian, Lao,
Thai and Vietnamese.
The Ethiopian fonts Goha??.bdf and GohaClasic??.bdf
are not used as legacy fonts. In all currently available non-console BDF fonts
the Ethiopian letters are double-width and can not be used on the console.
Thats why these fonts are treated equaly to the other non-legacy BDF fonts.
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The Hackers Guide for console-setup
Anton Zinovievanton@lml.bas.bg