FONTTOSFNT(1)

📦
version 1.2.4 · 4 versions
, in fedora 43, fedora 44, opensuse-leap 16.0

💅 FONTTOSFNT(1) — the fonttosfnt glow-up, bestie edition

okay so picture this: you've got a crusty little bitmap font, right? and you want it to live inside a shiny sfnt (OpenType) wrapper like it's moving into a cute new apartment. that's literally the whole job of fonttosfnt, and honestly? it ate. this page is from the General Commands Manual, section 1, and it's about to be your new hyperfixation. 🎀

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

fonttosfnt [ options ] -o file.otb [ -- ] [ font ] ...

that's it. that's the whole summoning ritual. 🫶

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so what it does: it wraps a bitmap font — or a whole set of bitmap fonts, yes you can bring your friends — inside a sfnt wrapper (that's TrueType or OpenType, for the uninitiated 💅).

and if you don't name any font at all? no drama. it just reads a BDF font from standard input (stdin). slay, honestly. ✨

🔥 OPTIONS 🔥

  • -v — be verbose. it will yap. sometimes you want it to yap. 🗣️
  • -c — do not crop glyphs. heads up: this usually makes the file bigger, but ngl, sometimes it actually yields a modest decrease in file size for small character cell fonts (you know, terminal fonts 🌈).
  • -b — write byte-aligned glyph data. by default it writes unaligned data, which gives you a smaller file size. trade-offs, bestie 💀
  • -r — do not reencode fonts. by default, fonts get reencoded to Unicode whenever possible — which is iconic and usually what you want, but hey, sometimes you don't. 😌
  • -g _n_ — set the type of scalable glyphs that we write. okay this one has lore:
    • if n is 0, no scalable glyphs are written — this is legal but lowkey confuses most current software 🙈
    • if n is 1, a single scalable glyph (the undefined glyph) is written — this is recommended, but it triggers a bug in current versions of FreeType 😭
    • if n is 2 (the default), a sufficiently high number of blank glyphs are written, which works with FreeType but increases file size 🫠
  • -m _n_ — set the type of scalable metrics that we write:
    • if n is 0, no scalable metrics are written, which may or may not be legal 👀
    • if n is 1, full metrics for a single glyph are written, and only left sidebearing values are written for the other glyphs
    • if n is 2, scalable metrics for all glyphs are written, which increases file size and is not recommended 💀
    • the default is 1 🧚
  • -- — end of options. nothing to see here, we're done with flags, move along ✨

💀 BUGS 💀

some of the font-level values — notably sub- and superscript positions — are dummy values. like, placeholder numbers. not the real thing. don't @ me, it's just how it is 😭

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

…and, for the vibes: Fonts in X11. 💜

👑 AUTHOR 👑

the version of Fonttosfnt included in this X.Org Foundation release was originally written by Juliusz Chroboczek <jch@freedesktop.org> for the XFree86 project. absolute legend behavior, tbh. periodt. 🫶

ngl bestie, if you're wrapping terminal fonts, maybe give -c a try and see if it actually shrinks things for you — the manpage says it might. no cap, just read the -c bullet again. 🍓

okay that's the whole page, mwah 💖 — this was fonttosfnt 1.2.4, X Version 11, and you're officially caught up. go wrap some fonts. 🦋

📦 where this page comes from