How do I select a diffferent font on my xscreensaver

[Moderator BobC]

I am trying to take text and output it via a program to the xscreensaver to scroll through, and one file (from wttr.in/?T) needs to be monospaced because it uses the ASCII line draw characters.

fc-list seems to provide a list of fonts

I found that xscreensaver has a -font option I can type in to tell it to use a different font, but none seem to show the line draw characters.

for example I try

-font LiberationMono-Regular.ttf

but I get no line draw characters?

Any ideas?

The pic is using the default font, but nothing lines up. I don’t know what font its using or how to find out, or what fonts have the line draw and little arrows for wind direction?

• This topic was modified 4 years, 12 months ago by BobC.

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[Anonymous]

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¡ʎsɐǝnb ǝɯ ǝpɐɯ oɯǝp ǝqnʇnoʎ ʇɐɥʇ ‘ɥƃn

apropos fonts
will show a list of the available commands about fonts.

fc-list | grep -i terminus
The fc-list command will output all the installed fonts. Better to narrow the list using grep after you have a specific font in mind.

Not a xscreensaver user, don’t have it installed, but maybe it wants *.pcf fonts and can’t handle ttf fonts.
To view samples of the installed xfonts, use the program
xfontsel
and after choosing family, size, weight etc, click select and the -*-*-whatever-*-*-* font designation string will be copied to primary selection clipboard.
Really I have no idea which of the fonts show line characters and which do not. Maybe they all do. Its ascii, right? So maybe correct output depends on specifying the correct encoding “iso8859” or whatever it needs or expects.

“man starwars” actually might call up a manpage for that screensaver. If not, you can go here https://github.com/Zygo/xscreensaver/tree/master/hacks/glx
and click to read starwars.man and starwars.txt but that might be for a newer version of the screensaver than what’s packaged by debian.

The launchstring to specify a custom font will be something like
starwars -font -*-terminus-bold-r-normal-*-*-720-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1 -program ‘yadayadda’

[Moderator BobC]

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I think the trick is it has to be Utf-8 and monospaced

curl -s wttr.in/?T > wttr.nocolor.txt # the /?T tells it no color

if I go edit that with mcedit, it has weird characters where the problems all, but if I go to encoding and change it to Utf-8 it changes all the weird stuff into dots and everything lines up perfectly. Actually, if I could change them all to dots, that would be good enough.

“UTF-8 is an ASCII-preserving encoding method for Unicode (ISO 10646)”

I tried installing powerline fonts https://github.com/powerline/fonts

Rebuilt font cache:
Fontconfig

In some distributions, Terminess Powerline is ignored by default and must be explicitly allowed. A fontconfig file is provided which enables it. Copy this file from the fontconfig directory to your home folder under ~/.config/fontconfig/conf.d (create it if it doesn’t exist) and re-run fc-cache -vf.

but xfontsel has the same fonts afterwards, and none work. I’m guessing they must be the wrong kind of fonts of some sort. I am not installing the right thing it looks.

And PS: thanks for helping once again

• This reply was modified 4 years, 12 months ago by BobC.

[Anonymous]

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It’s a fun outside the box project and I’m glad to help but sort of flying blind here. I did find a couple more {different} pages about setting the font for xscreensaver.
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/292603/change-screensaver-font-size-molecule-xscreensaver
http://www.bstegmaier.de/xscreensaver-theming

[Moderator BobC]

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Oh, I tried and tried and tried.

The very best I could find was terminus, but it doesn’t display the line draw characters, replacing them all with grainy rectangles, but I guess that just has to be good enough. At least the boxes line up, so it doesn’t look like a mess.

I recall 20 years ago being able to change the characters of fonts, but I can’t find anything to do that, nor could I find a font converter that can create xft fonts, to try any of the newer ones I downloaded.

The naive person in me asks why I can’t just use the same font that the browser uses… Oh well, my screensaver text driver is working. I don’t think I really need to be able to browse from it. I’ll probably just figure a way to open a browser with a list of URL’s to bring up, and then put that on a hot key. That will do fine, as I doubt I’ll be changing the list that often, anyway, once I like it…

Thanks for the help 🙂

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