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Technology, (sdf.org), 10/08/2018
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I've got a Pi3 with a crumby little 3.5" TTF attached to it.
The bad thing about this little TTF (and the good thing) is
that it's a composite device (a backup-cam screen for auto
use) and you can't really get a pixel-for-pixel
representation on the screen. There's probably a technical
term for the problem I'm describing, but I don't know it.
One challenge with such a small screen is getting a useful
amount of characters in the width of the console. With the
default console font, you can't do much- I am getting a 40
column width.) Switch to the font named Latin15-Terminus12x6
and you can start to do more, but it's still lacking (I get
a 53 column width this way.)
Enter the old "tom thumb" font, which you may recall from
some old Palm Pilot software[1]. It's in BDF format, which
makes it relatively easy to convert to PSF for use as a
console font (or, can you just use the BDF? I don't know.)
Here's the command line I used:
bdf2psf --fb tom-thumb.bdf \
/usr/share/bdf2psf/standard.equivalents \
/usr/share/bdf2psf/ascii.set+/usr/share/bdf2psf/useful.set \
256 Fixed4x6.psf
With this font, I get a width of exactly 80 columns and 40
rows. It's like someone knew I'd be doing this one day...
Of course, this font is a sort of last-possible-choice
option, with an incomplete character set, and extremely poor
readability on the type of display I'm using. But hey, it's
one way to get 80 columns- should I need them- out of this
technology.
For fun, I also dropped to a console from X and loaded the
font up on my laptop. stty -a reveals that I'm getting 133
rows and 320 columns. On my laptop screen, it's a lot more
readable, but of course very, very tiny.
[1]
https://robey.lag.net/2010/01/23/tiny-monospace-font.html
