[H-GEN] Font Tomfoolery

[Christopher Biggs]

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Jason Parker-Burlingham <jasonp at panix.com> moved upon the face of the 'Net and spake thusly:

> Christopher Biggs <chris at epipe.com.au> writes:
>
>> I use the "neep" fonts, which are a free, and pleasant looking,
>
> That's a nice font, but you must have a kick-ass display resolution to
> be able to work well in neep-18.  Maybe if I switched to
> ratpoison...[1]

I run three 17" monitors at 1152x864 each, with "larswm" (which, like
ratpoison, is a keyboard-savvy minimalist window manager).  I generally
therefore only have one active window per screen, although I fall back
to smaller fonts when I want, say, four 80x25 xterms tiled on one
screen.

My badly abused eyesight is reaching the limit that can be corrected
to normalcy by spectacles, so I now try very hard to be kind to my
eyes.   

> [1] : What I *want* is to be able to run all my character-based apps
>       in ratpoison or ion, and have the few graphical apps I run
>       (mozilla, naturally, and the occasional abiword to fill out EO
>       forms sent by various people as part of job applications)
>       displayed in a more conventional window manager.  I could
>       probably hack it up with Xnest but the whole idea makes my
>       stomach churn.
>
>       Do I have options?

Check out a little proggy called "x2x".  You can run two or more
X-servers, either on the same machine or on separate PCs, and slave
them all to a single mouse-keyboard pair.  (See also x2vnc, which
allows one or more of your screens to be a windows box).

I run XFree86 in dual-head mode (with larswm) on my main PC, and have
another PC which dual boots either Linux + XFree86 (with Gnome) or
Win2k displaying on a third monitor.  All three screens are controlled
from one keyboard+mouse, by simply panning the mouse pointer across
all three screens.    

> [2] : For example the tilde isn't really in the right place for me; I
>       like my Twiddles to sit just a little below the top of a
>       lowercase "o" unless it would look *really* strange.  I seem to
>       recall asking on this list about that at some point.

You _can_ get font editors for X bitmap fonts, so if you find a font
that is /almost/ what you want...

--cjb

-- 
Christopher Biggs   ---   chris at epipe.com.au   ---   ePipe Pty Ltd Australia.
There's a bug in my mailer that mangles my sig but V guvax V'ir svkrq vg abj.
Uneqyl jbegu qrpbqvat, jnf vg? Rznvy zr "Fhowrpg: fraqctcxrl" sbe zl CTC xrl.


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