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X Fonts

Listing Available Fonts

The X Window system comes with a huge set of fonts. To see a listing of the fonts available on your system, try a program called xlsfonts:

xlsfonts | more 

This lists out many fonts, such as:

-adobe-courier-bold-r-normal--12-120-75-75-m-70-iso8859-1
-adobe-new century schoolbook-medium-r-normal--34-240-100-100-p-181-iso8859-1
-daewoo-gothic-medium-r-normal--16-120-100-100-c-160-ksc5601.1987-0
-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--14-130-75-75-c-140-jisx0208.1983-0
lucidasans-bold-14
cursor

Some of the multi-part names are quite long. These names follow a standard called X Logical Font Description, or XLFD.

Each part of an XLFD name is separated by a hyphen. If a part is missing, you'll see two hyphens in a row. You can also use wildcards, such as * for fields you don't care about.

Going in order, from left to right, the fields follow:

Field	Example	Description
Foundry	adobe,b&h	The company that created the font.
Font family	times, lucidasans	Basic font family name
Weight	bold, medium	How thick the letters are
Slant	i, r	Italic, roman, oblique, etc. Code Meaning i Italic o Oblique r Roman ri Reverse Italic ro Reverse Oblique ot Other number Scaled font (R6)
Set-width name	normal, condensed	Width of characters
Additional style	sans	Extra info to describe font
Pixel size	26, 20	Height, in pixels, of characters
Point size	190, 140	Ten times height of characters in points
Dots-per-inch	100-100, 75-75	Dots per inch in X and Y directions. You can generally ignore this.
Spacing	m, p, c	Spacing Spacing Meaning c Character-cell/monospaced m Monospaced p Proportional number Scaled font (R6)
Average width	94, 159	Ten times the average width in pixels
Charset registry	iso8859-1	Character set encoding in the font, some examples: Character Set Meaning iso8859-1 Western Europe hp-roman8 Western Europe (Hewlett-Packard only) iso8859-2 Eastern Europe ksc5601.1987-0 Korean jisx0208.1983-0 Japanese

For more information on XLFD fonts, see chapter 7 in The UNIX System Administrator's Guide to X.

Last updated: August 30 1999