[Fontconfig] <alias> replace dejavu sans with Verdana

[Chris Jones]

On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 03:58:49PM EDT, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> On 09/23/2009 03:56 PM, Chris Jones wrote:
> 
> > PS. This is unrelated and OT to this list, but what would be a suitable
> > mailing list or newsgroup to ask questions about unicode fonts and how
> > to set up xterm for a pleasant unicode experience?
> 
> Should be fine around here.
> 
> I use:
> 
> uxterm -u8 -fa '\''DejaVu Sans Mono'\'' -fs 12

It's mostly for testing purposes, stuff that I'm learning and I found
that gnu/unifont has a glyph for practically every character.

I tried Sans Mono but one issue that I had with it is that in my setup
it was barely legible. On a terminal, I'd rather stick to a bitmap font,
provided there exists one with a suitable pointsize. 

In terms of looks and legibility,

-gnu-unifont-medium-r-normal--17-170-75-75-c-80-iso10646-1 

came as a pleasant surprise.

Unfortunately, it doesn't play well with xterm, for stuff like:

ⒶⒷ

that should come out as:

Ⓐ Ⓑ  

I had to add a space between the two characters to avoid the overlay.

:-)

The good thing about gnu/unifont is that practically everything that
might have been entered will display, which is adhoc to my needs - one
font taking care of everything.

Other issues that I've run into with xterm is that I'm pretty sure it
does not support anything RTL, such as Hebrew or Yiddish.

And lastly, unless you have something running on top of it that has
its own input method - or methods since vim for instance has two
different ways to enter characters that your keyboard does no provide via
a single key - it would appear you are limited to a subset of what you
find in /usr/share/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose. 

Unlike vim or GTK applications, where as a last resort, you can always
enter the actual U+xxxx code point.

I guess I'll ask more precise questions as I research this further.

Thanks,

CJ