PSFADDTABLE(1)

💖 PSFADDTABLE 💖

okay bestie, gather round, because we're talking about psfaddtable — that's the General Commands Manual entry, section 1, and she is so much cooler than her name suggests. sit with me. 🫶

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✨ NAME ✨

psfaddtable — add a Unicode character table to a console font. that's it, that's the whole job, and she does it flawlessly. 👑

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

psfaddtable fontfile tablefile outfile

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so here's the vibe. psfaddtable takes a console font in .psf format — that's your fontfile, bestie — and merges it with the Unicode character table you hand over in tablefile. the glow-up result? a font file with an embedded character table, written out to outfile. iconic behaviour, no notes. 💅

a couple of little rules that are lowkey important:

• if you use - as an input file name, that means standard input. yes, she's flexible like that.
• if you use - as an output file name, that means standard output.
• and if your fontfile already has an embedded character table? it gets ignored. not merged, not respected, just… ignored. 🙈

ngl, that last one catches people out. if you were hoping to layer tables on top of each other, that is not what's happening here. periodt.

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🎀 TABLE FILE FORMAT 🎀

this is the part everyone wants to skip and then gets confused about, so let's not. each line in your tablefile has to be exactly one of these three things:

1. blank.
2. a comment — and comments are preceded by #.
3. a sequence of numbers, separated by spaces or tabs.

and those numbers? they can be written in any of these formats, which is very generous of her honestly:

• decimal — this is the default, so just write the number, no ceremony.
• octal — preceded by 0.
• hexadecimal — preceded by 0x.

now, the actual meaning, because this is where it gets good:

• the first number on each line tells you the glyph slot in the font that's being referred to. its range depends on how big your font is:
  • 0 to 0xff for a 256-character font
  • 0 to 0x1ff for a 512-character font
• any subsequent numbers on the same line are Unicodes that are matched by that specific glyph slot.

and here's the cute extra bit: instead of a single Unicode, you can have a sequence of Unicodes separated by commas — that's how you say "this glyph depicts the corresponding composed symbol." so a little comma party, basically. 🍓

also, and this is the freeing part: it is totally permissible to have multiple lines for the same glyph. go off. spread them out. she doesn't mind. ✨

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🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

• setfont(8)
• psfgettable(1)
• psfstriptable(1)
• psfxtable(1)

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and that's the whole page, bestie. this beauty lives in the kbd family and this particular version is dated 25 Oct 1994 — yeah, she's been serving since before you were born and she's still on the PSFADDTABLE(1) beat. respect the elders. 💜✨