yagiz-aydin / spleen

Monospaced bitmap fonts

Spleen

Spleen is a monospaced bitmap font available in 5 sizes:

• 5x8
• 8x16
• 12x24
• 16x32
• 32x64

Each size is provided in the Glyph Bitmap Distribution Format (BDF), and release tarballs contain the fonts in the following formats: PCF, PSF (for the Linux console), and .dfont for Macintosh users.

All font sizes contain all ISO/IEC 8859-1 characters (Basic Latin and Latin-1 Supplement Unicode block), Latin Extended-A characters, as well as Box Drawing, Block Elements, and Braille Patterns Unicode blocks, except for the 5x8 version.

Due to character size constraints, the 5x8 version only contains printable ASCII characters, the Braille Patterns Unicode block, and light Box Drawing characters.

Spleen also has support for Powerline symbols out of the box.

The font name is a reference to Baudelaire.

Screenshots

The following screenshots show Spleen 16x32 displaying code and prose.

ASCII characters for all sizes:

Spleen 5x8:

Spleen 8x16:

Spleen 12x24:

Spleen 16x32:

Spleen 32x64:

XLFD font names

-misc-spleen-medium-r-normal--8-80-72-72-c-50-iso10646-1
-misc-spleen-medium-r-normal--16-160-72-72-c-80-iso10646-1
-misc-spleen-medium-r-normal--24-240-72-72-c-120-iso10646-1
-misc-spleen-medium-r-normal--32-320-72-72-c-160-iso10646-1
-misc-spleen-medium-r-normal--64-640-72-72-c-320-iso10646-1

Packages

Packages are available for the following operating systems:

• OpenBSD
• NetBSD
• FreeBSD
• Arch Linux
• Void Linux
• Nix

Manual installation

*BSD and Linux

Clone the repository, convert the files to the Portable Compiled Format (PCF) using bdftopcf and run mkfontdir in the directory.

Alternatively, release tarballs provide PCF files for each size.

Mac OS X / macOS

macOS users should use the .dfont files provided in the release tarballs.

Windows

Windows users should use the .otf file provided in the release tarballs.

Usage

*BSD and Linux

Update the font path to include Spleen:

xset +fp /usr/local/share/fonts/spleen/

Update .Xdefaults and add one of the following directives:

xterm*faceName: spleen:pixelsize=8:antialias=false
xterm*faceName: spleen:pixelsize=16:antialias=false
xterm*faceName: spleen:pixelsize=24:antialias=false
xterm*faceName: spleen:pixelsize=32:antialias=false
xterm*faceName: spleen:pixelsize=64:antialias=false

Launch xterm.

Ubuntu has bitmap fonts support disabled by default, instructions to enable it are available here.

Linux console

Release tarballs provide PSF files for each size, setfont can be used to load and set the desired font.

FreeBSD console

The FreeBSD package contains .fnt files which can be loaded using vidcontrol(1).

For example, to load Spleen 16x32:

vidcontrol -f /usr/local/share/fonts/spleen/spleen-16x32.fnt

Mac OS X / macOS

Configure the terminal application to use Spleen, and make sure anti-aliasing is disabled.

Use the following sizes:

• Spleen 5x8: 8 Pt
• Spleen 8x16: 16 Pt
• Spleen 12x24: 24 Pt
• Spleen 16x32: 32 Pt
• Spleen 32x64: 64 Pt

Windows

Configure the terminal application to use Spleen in size 12, and make sure anti-aliasing is disabled.

License

Spleen is released under the BSD 2-Clause license. See LICENSE file for details.

Author

Spleen is developed by Frederic Cambus.

• Site: https://www.cambus.net

Resources

GitHub: https://github.com/fcambus/spleen

Trivia

• Spleen is the default font for OpenBSD consoles since January 2019
• Spleen was imported in the NetBSD src tree in March 2019