Sigma Consolefonts FOR LINUX

Sigma Consolefonts package contains a set of UTF-8 fonts which provide readability and wide coverage. Actually, it is only one font, in an 8x16 size but with a number of variations of what gets mapped into the (psfu) consolefont. If you aren't using Linux and a UTF-8 locale, this probably will not have any relevance to you.

Still interested ? Ok, here is a less than wonderful photograph of what the sigma-general version of this font can do. Apologies for the poor quality of the photo, I hope you can get an idea of what this does - and if you are using the linux console without a graphical desktop, you'll just have to download it to try it out.

Key Features:

• Provides readability and wide coverage


• UTF-8 font


• Comes in 8x16 size with variations


• Appropriate for servers and console users


• Source and map files included for customization

Specifications:

• Price: FREE


• Publisher: Ken Moffat


• Size: 8x16


• Compatibility: Linux


• Includes glyphs for various languages

The font itself started out as etl16 from one of the debian console packages. I altered it to give more balanced letters - longer descenders at the expense of less space above the letters, and bringing the accents closer to the letter. The 'cell' format of a capital letter is 3 rows above the letter, 10 rows for the letter, and another 3 rows for the descender. In hex, that is 3A3, hence the name (U+03A3 is \u03a3).

Customization:

Unlike most other console fonts, these come with the source (a bdf font) and a series of map files to decide what to include. If you really dislike the form of one of the letters you can alter it - the bdf is just 16 lines of hex codes, e.g. a capital U has nine lines of x42 (0100 0010) and a baseline of x3C (0011 1100).

Languages:

The tarball includes my attempt at listing the alphabets for the languages covered. For most people, I think the 'general' version should work well (latin, greek and the main european cyrillic letters). Some people may prefer the 'cyrillic' variant (all current cyrillic, greek, some latin letters. There is also a 'caucasian' variant (latin, cyrillic, armenian, georgian) and some other example and proof-of-concept variants, e.g. 'african', 'polytonic', 'vietnamese'.

Ultimately, the African languages are limited by a lack of precomposed glyphs in unicode, but some languages such as venda should work. Languages with multiple accents above the letter (livonian, polytonic greek, vietnamese) are not wonderful in the 8x16 size, but they might suffice.