vfont2ppm(1)

💖 vfont2ppm(1) — the PSF Tools glow-up 💖

okay bestie, listen. this is vfont2ppm, a lil tool from PSF Tools, and it's genuinely iconic for one specific job: turning a vfont (or vfont2) file into a Portable PixMap so you can actually look at it with your eyeballs instead of squinting at hex. i got you. 🫶

---

✨ NAME ✨

vfont2ppm — convert a vfont or vfont2 file to a portable bitmap 💅

---

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

vfont2ppm [-across=columns] [-align] [INPUTFILE [OUTPUTFILE]]

---

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so what it does: vfont2ppm converts a font in the .PSF format into a Portable PixMap image, and that image shows all its characters, laid out 32 to a line by default. no cap, it's the easiest way to preview vfont files — you literally just pipe them into it, like:

vfont2ppm | xv -

and boom, you're staring at your font. main character energy fr fr. ✨

now, the cute details on the resulting image, bc this is where it gets good:

• the character's baseline point shows up in red 🔴
• the horizontal and vertical baselines show up in green 🟢
• and if the baseline point is outside the character bitmap? then the space between it and the bitmap gets shown in yellow 🟡

it's giving annotated, and we love that. 🎀

---

💅 OPTIONS 💅

• --across=columns — sets how many columns to display (32 by default, she's the standard). the number of rows gets derived from the number of columns, so you don't gotta do that math yourself. 🧚
• --align — okay so by default, the character bitmaps are shown with no attempt to align them horizontally or vertically. which means a character with a descender (think p) may sit at a different height than one without (think o). 🙈 if you throw --align in there, their horizontal and vertical basepoints get aligned to a grid. slay. but fair warning: this may result in more white space between the bitmaps. trade-offs, bestie. 💀

---

👑 SEE ALSO 👑

• xv(1)
• psf2xbm(1)

---

🌈 AUTHOR 🌈

John Elliott <seasip.webmaster@gmail.com> 💜 — the legend himself.

---

ngl, if you're previewing fonts and you're not piping to xv, what are you even doing. iykyk. 💖

---

and that's the whole page, periodt. ✨ this was Version 1.1.3, dated 22 January, 2021, brought to you by the PSF Tools girlies — go convert something cute. 🎀🦋💅