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Fixed (typeface)
Encyclopedia
misc-fixed is a collection of monospace bitmap
fonts
that is distributed with the X Window System
. It is a set of independent bitmap fonts which—apart from all being sans-serif fonts—cannot be described as belonging to a single font family. The misc-fixed fonts were the first fonts available for the X Window System
. Their individual origin is not attributed, but it is likely that many of them were created in the early or mid 1980s as part of MIT's Project Athena
, or at its industrial partner, DEC
. The misc-fixed fonts are available under a "public domain – share and enjoy" licence.
The individual fonts in the collection have a short name that matches their respective pixel dimensions, plus a letter that indicates a bold or oblique
variant. They can also be accessed using their (much longer) X Logical Font Description
string:
The "6x13" font is usually also available under the alias "fixed", a font name that is expected to be available on every X server.
The fonts originally covered only the ASCII
repertoire, and were in the early 1990s extended to cover all characters in ISO 8859-1. In 1997, Markus Kuhn
initiated and headed a project to extend the misc-fixed fonts to as large a subset of Unicode
/ISO 10646 as is feasible for each of the available font sizes. This project's goal was to get GNU/Linux developers interested in abandoning the in the 1990s dominant ISO 8859-1 encoding, in favour of using UTF-8
instead, which happened indeed within a few years. Thanks to this effort, all the misc fixed fonts now cover the characters found in
The 6x13, 8x13, 9x15, 9x18, and 10x20 fonts cover a much larger repertoire, that covers in addition the comprehensive CEN MES-3A European Unicode 3.2 subset, the International Phonetic Alphabet
, Armenian
, Georgian
, Thai
, Yiddish, all Latin
, Greek
, and Cyrillic characters, all mathematical symbols (including the entire TeX
repertoire), APL, Braille
, Runes, and much more. 9x15 and 10x20 also cover Ethiopic.
The misc-fixed fonts have been much less commonly used since support for scalable outline font formats such as Type 1
, TrueType
and OpenType
has become available for X. However, they are still commonly used with terminal emulator
s, such as xterm
, and as a fallback font for the many Unicode characters not yet found in common outline fonts.
The fonts are distributed in the BDF
format and are currently maintained by Markus Kuhn
.
Bitmap
In computer graphics, a bitmap or pixmap is a type of memory organization or image file format used to store digital images. The term bitmap comes from the computer programming terminology, meaning just a map of bits, a spatially mapped array of bits. Now, along with pixmap, it commonly refers to...
fonts
Typeface
In typography, a typeface is the artistic representation or interpretation of characters; it is the way the type looks. Each type is designed and there are thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly....
that is distributed with the X Window System
X Window System
The X window system is a computer software system and network protocol that provides a basis for graphical user interfaces and rich input device capability for networked computers...
. It is a set of independent bitmap fonts which—apart from all being sans-serif fonts—cannot be described as belonging to a single font family. The misc-fixed fonts were the first fonts available for the X Window System
X Window System
The X window system is a computer software system and network protocol that provides a basis for graphical user interfaces and rich input device capability for networked computers...
. Their individual origin is not attributed, but it is likely that many of them were created in the early or mid 1980s as part of MIT's Project Athena
Project Athena
Project Athena was a joint project of MIT, Digital Equipment Corporation, and IBM to produce a campus-wide distributed computing environment for educational use. It was launched in 1983, and research and development ran until June 30, 1991, eight years after it began...
, or at its industrial partner, DEC
Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s...
. The misc-fixed fonts are available under a "public domain – share and enjoy" licence.
The individual fonts in the collection have a short name that matches their respective pixel dimensions, plus a letter that indicates a bold or oblique
Italic type
In typography, italic type is a cursive typeface based on a stylized form of calligraphic handwriting. Owing to the influence from calligraphy, such typefaces often slant slightly to the right. Different glyph shapes from roman type are also usually used—another influence from calligraphy...
variant. They can also be accessed using their (much longer) X Logical Font Description
X logical font description
X logical font description is a font standard used by the X Window System. It is intended to support:* unique, descriptive font names that support simple pattern matching* multiple font vendors, arbitrary character sets, and encodings...
string:
| 5x7 | -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--7-70-75-75-C-50-ISO10646-1 |
| 5x8 | -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--8-80-75-75-C-50-ISO10646-1 |
| 6x9 | -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--9-90-75-75-C-60-ISO10646-1 |
| 6x10 | -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--10-100-75-75-C-60-ISO10646-1 |
| 6x12 | -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Semicondensed--12-110-75-75-C-60-ISO10646-1 |
| 6x13 | -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-SemiCondensed--13-120-75-75-C-60-ISO10646-1 |
| 6x13B | -Misc-Fixed-Bold-R-SemiCondensed--13-120-75-75-C-60-ISO10646-1 |
| 6x13O | -Misc-Fixed-Medium-O-SemiCondensed--13-120-75-75-C-60-ISO10646-1 |
| 7x13 | -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--13-120-75-75-C-70-ISO10646-1 |
| 7x13B | -Misc-Fixed-Bold-R-Normal--13-120-75-75-C-70-ISO10646-1 |
| 7x13O | -Misc-Fixed-Medium-O-Normal--13-120-75-75-C-70-ISO10646-1 |
| 7x14 | -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--14-130-75-75-C-70-ISO10646-1 |
| 7x14B | -Misc-Fixed-Bold-R-Normal--14-130-75-75-C-70-ISO10646-1 |
| 8x13 | -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--13-120-75-75-C-80-ISO10646-1 |
| 8x13B | -Misc-Fixed-Bold-R-Normal--13-120-75-75-C-80-ISO10646-1 |
| 8x13O | -Misc-Fixed-Medium-O-Normal--13-120-75-75-C-80-ISO10646-1 |
| 9x15 | -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--15-140-75-75-C-90-ISO10646-1 |
| 9x15B | -Misc-Fixed-Bold-R-Normal--15-140-75-75-C-90-ISO10646-1 |
| 9x18 | -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--18-120-100-100-C-90-ISO10646-1 |
| 9x18B | -Misc-Fixed-Bold-R-Normal--18-120-100-100-C-90-ISO10646-1 |
| 10x20 | -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--20-200-75-75-C-100-ISO10646-1 |
| 12x13ja | -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal-ja-13-120-75-75-C-120-ISO10646-1 |
| 18x18ja | -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal-ja-18-120-100-100-C-180-ISO10646-1 |
| 18x18ko | -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal-ko-18-120-100-100-C-180-ISO10646-1 |
The "6x13" font is usually also available under the alias "fixed", a font name that is expected to be available on every X server.
The fonts originally covered only the ASCII
ASCII
The American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text...
repertoire, and were in the early 1990s extended to cover all characters in ISO 8859-1. In 1997, Markus Kuhn
Markus Kuhn
Markus G. Kuhn is a German computer scientist, currently teaching and researching at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory. A graduate of the University of Erlangen , he received his MSc at Purdue University and PhD at the University of Cambridge...
initiated and headed a project to extend the misc-fixed fonts to as large a subset of Unicode
Unicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
/ISO 10646 as is feasible for each of the available font sizes. This project's goal was to get GNU/Linux developers interested in abandoning the in the 1990s dominant ISO 8859-1 encoding, in favour of using UTF-8
UTF-8
UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks...
instead, which happened indeed within a few years. Thanks to this effort, all the misc fixed fonts now cover the characters found in
- ISO 8859 parts 1-5, 7-10, 13-15 (i.e., all parts except Arabic and Thai)
- ISO 6937 and the CEN MES-1 European Unicode Subset
- IBMIBMInternational Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
/MicrosoftMicrosoftMicrosoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
code pages CP 437Code page 437IBM PC or MS-DOS code page 437 is the character set of the original IBM PC. It is also known as CP 437, OEM 437, PC-8, MS-DOS Latin US or sometimes misleadingly referred to as the OEM font, High ASCII or Extended ASCII....
, 850, 1251, 1252, and many others - MicrosoftMicrosoftMicrosoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
/Adobe SystemsAdobe SystemsAdobe Systems Incorporated is an American computer software company founded in 1982 and headquartered in San Jose, California, United States...
Windows Glyph List 4Windows Glyph List 4Windows Glyph List 4, or more commonly WGL4 for short, also known as the Pan-European character set, is a character repertoire on recent Microsoft operating systems comprising 652 Unicode characters...
(WGL4) - KOI8-RKOI8-RKOI8-R is an 8-bit character encoding, designed to cover Russian, which uses the Cyrillic alphabet. It also happens to cover Bulgarian, but is not used since CP1251 is accepted. A derivative encoding is KOI8-U, which adds Ukrainian characters...
- DECDigital Equipment CorporationDigital Equipment Corporation was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s...
VT100VT100The VT100 is a video terminal that was made by Digital Equipment Corporation . Its detailed attributes became the de facto standard for terminal emulators.-History:...
graphics symbols
The 6x13, 8x13, 9x15, 9x18, and 10x20 fonts cover a much larger repertoire, that covers in addition the comprehensive CEN MES-3A European Unicode 3.2 subset, the International Phonetic Alphabet
International Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic...
, Armenian
Armenian alphabet
The Armenian alphabet is an alphabet that has been used to write the Armenian language since the year 405 or 406. It was devised by Saint Mesrop Mashtots, an Armenian linguist and ecclesiastical leader, and contained originally 36 letters. Two more letters, օ and ֆ, were added in the Middle Ages...
, Georgian
Georgian alphabet
The Georgian alphabet is the writing system used to write the Georgian language and other Kartvelian languages , and occasionally other languages of the Caucasus such as Ossetic and Abkhaz during the 1940s...
, Thai
Thai alphabet
Thai script , is used to write the Thai language and other, minority, languages in Thailand. It has forty-four consonants , fifteen vowel symbols that combine into at least twenty-eight vowel forms, and four tone marks ....
, Yiddish, all Latin
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...
, Greek
Greek alphabet
The Greek alphabet is the script that has been used to write the Greek language since at least 730 BC . The alphabet in its classical and modern form consists of 24 letters ordered in sequence from alpha to omega...
, and Cyrillic characters, all mathematical symbols (including the entire TeX
TeX
TeX is a typesetting system designed and mostly written by Donald Knuth and released in 1978. Within the typesetting system, its name is formatted as ....
repertoire), APL, Braille
Braille
The Braille system is a method that is widely used by blind people to read and write, and was the first digital form of writing.Braille was devised in 1825 by Louis Braille, a blind Frenchman. Each Braille character, or cell, is made up of six dot positions, arranged in a rectangle containing two...
, Runes, and much more. 9x15 and 10x20 also cover Ethiopic.
The misc-fixed fonts have been much less commonly used since support for scalable outline font formats such as Type 1
PostScript
PostScript is a dynamically typed concatenative programming language created by John Warnock and Charles Geschke in 1982. It is best known for its use as a page description language in the electronic and desktop publishing areas. Adobe PostScript 3 is also the worldwide printing and imaging...
, TrueType
TrueType
TrueType is an outline font standard originally developed by Apple Computer in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts used in PostScript...
and OpenType
OpenType
OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. It was built on its predecessor TrueType, retaining TrueType's basic structure and adding many intricate data structures for prescribing typographic behavior...
has become available for X. However, they are still commonly used with terminal emulator
Terminal emulator
A terminal emulator, terminal application, term, or tty for short, is a program that emulates a video terminal within some other display architecture....
s, such as xterm
Xterm
In computing, xterm is the standard terminal emulator for the X Window System. A user can have many different invocations of xterm running at once on the same display, each of which provides independent input/output for the process running in it .xterm originated prior to the X Window System...
, and as a fallback font for the many Unicode characters not yet found in common outline fonts.
The fonts are distributed in the BDF
Glyph Bitmap Distribution Format
The Glyph Bitmap Distribution Format by Adobe is a file format for storing bitmap fonts. The content is presented as a text file that is intended to be human and computer readable. BDF is typically used in Unix environments.-Overview:...
format and are currently maintained by Markus Kuhn
Markus Kuhn
Markus G. Kuhn is a German computer scientist, currently teaching and researching at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory. A graduate of the University of Erlangen , he received his MSc at Purdue University and PhD at the University of Cambridge...
.
External links
- Unicode fonts and tools for X11 is Markus KuhnMarkus KuhnMarkus G. Kuhn is a German computer scientist, currently teaching and researching at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory. A graduate of the University of Erlangen , he received his MSc at Purdue University and PhD at the University of Cambridge...
's web page on the current Unicode-extended version of the misc-fixed collection