Font Families
It has been several years since the advent of desktop publishing and, by now, it is unlikely that anyone in the computer industry is unaware that text can be displayed on the screen and printed on the page using different fonts.
However, the term font is used somewhat ambiguously. Does it refer to a family of typefaces (such as Timesо Roman or Helveticaо), which comes in different sizes, weights, and orienнtations? Or should each distinct set of character glyphs be considered a separate font?
X takes the latter approach. When the documentation says that Release 3 includes 157 fonts, and Release 4 more than 400, this sounds either intimidating or impressive, depending on your mood. But, in fact, the R3 X distribution includes only six font families (Courier, Helнvetica, New Century Schoolbookо, Symbol, and Times), plus several miscellaneous fonts that are found only in individual sizes and orientations.*)
R4 includes two more font families: Lucidaо and the Clean family of fixed-width fonts, plus many more special purpose fonts.
When you think about it this way, you can quickly reduce the clutter. Figure 2.1 shows the major families of commercial fonts that are available under X.
Figure 2.1
Font names. Release 3 and 4.
To illustrate the fonts, we've used the simple expedient of printing each font name in the font itself. Font names are trunнcated to fit on the page. (For those of you who don't read the Greek alphabet, the fourth line down reads "-adobe-symbol-medium-r-normal-lS ..." This font is used for mathematical equations and so forth, rather than for normal display purposes.)
*)
By contrast, the Macintosh supports dozens of font families; commercial typesetters support hundreds and, in some cases, even thousands of families. Many of these fonts will doubtless be made commercially available for X. tTo generate the figures in this section and in Appendix B, Release 4 Standard Fonts, we wrote a short program called xshowfonts, which displays a series of fonts in a scrollable window. Source code for xshowfonts is listed in Appendix B, Release 4 Standard Fonts, In each case, we used wildcards (discussed later in this chapter) to select the fonts we wanted and then did screendumps of the resulting images. Note that the fonts look better on the screen than they do in the illustration, since the scaling factor used to make the screen dumps exacerbates the "jagged edges*' enнdemic to bitmap fonts.
