7

I would like to be able to display in the Wine console all characters that the Win32 console can display. I've written a small test program to print out all 8-bit characters:

#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
  int i, j;
  for (i = 0; i <= 0xF0; i+=0x10) {
    for (j = i; j <= i + 0x0F; ++j)
      printf("%2x:%c", j, (char)j);
    printf("\n");
  }

  getchar();
  return 0;
}

Under Wine, the best I can do so far is using Andale Mono:

Screenshot of character set displayed on Wine console

While this is what I see on Windows Server 2008:

Screenshot of character set displayed on Windows Server 2008

Is there anywhere I can legally download a font that will allow me to view all of those characters under Wine?

edit I've found a set of DOS fonts that includes a CP437 font, which should cover the character set I'm interested in. However, even if I install this font, wineconsole doesn't seem to recognize it. Is there any way I can get wineconsole to use this font, or convert this font to a format that wineconsole can use? Or is there any way I can extract fonts from DOSEMU for use in Wine?

Oh, and I should probably mention that I'm on Mac OS X 10.6.2, installing Wine via MacPorts, using the wine-devel package.

more information

I have tried installing some console fonts that should cover the full character set as Mac OS X fonts (such as the NewDOS font listed above, and a font I tried converting from the fonts supplied by DOSEMU). Wine does not seem to pick up on new fonts installed in Mac OS X. Is there a way to register new fonts I've installed with Wine? Would manually editing the system.reg file that seems to contain font mappings work, or is there something else I'd need to do?

bump

Bounty ends soon, I'm still looking for an answer for this. Does anyone use the Wine console for complex text user interfaces?

3 Answers 3

1

The Lucida Console font, which ships with Windows, is one of two fonts you can choose in the Windows Console, and supports the full character set demonstrated above (as well as many other accented Latin characters). It can be purchased from Ascender for $30.

This would probably meet my need, but I would rather not spend $30 on a font, so I'm still looking to see if anyone can provide a free alternative.

0

From what I could find online, Wine doesn't support the FON bitmap font format. You should, however, be able to convert them to TTF, though that seems to be a bit of a tedious process. The Wine wiki refers to this page:

http://wiki.jswindle.com/index.php/Fonts#Converting_Fonts

which refers to an old version of some Wine documentation again. That link is broken, but it's the same as this page:

http://www.sdconsult.no/linux/wine-doc/fonts.html

This revolves around the fnt2bdf tool, which might be part of Wine, or otherwise you'll have to compile it yourself. You can find some more discussion about it here and here.

To get from bdf to ttf again (if that's necessary, I'm not sure), you should be able to use FontForge. And incidentally, those DOSEMU fonts are in BDF format too and part of the DOSEMU source, so presumably you could convert those to TTF as well.

3
  • This points me in some helpful directions, but doesn't solve the problem. My wine does not appear to have installed the tools; do I need to simply download and build the source and run the fnt2bdf out of the source directory? Also, the installation instructions for the fonts appear to be for Linux, while I'm on Mac OS X. Are there instructions for how to do this on Mac OS X? I've tried installing some new fonts, just as normal Mac fonts, but Wine doesn't seem to see them when I set the font for the console. Is there a way to get Wine to refresh its font list? Jan 26, 2010 at 5:50
  • I don't think Wine gets its fonts from the OS. Instead it gets them from its own "virtual" C:\windows\fonts folder. You should install the fonts in that folder. I'm not sure where you can find that though. It might be in ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/fonts. I'm afraid I can't help with your other question.
    – user2913
    Jan 26, 2010 at 21:32
  • That doesn't appear to be correct; in .wine/system.reg, I see lots of mappings from font names to paths that are in the Z: drive (my root filesystem, as opposed to the virtual C: drive) which point to fonts installed on my system, both some X11 fonts and some fonts in regular Mac font folders. I see no fonts in ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/Fonts, other than the NewDOS font that I tried installing, but Wine isn't seeing. Jan 30, 2010 at 0:38
0

Well, I tend to use unifont for a lot of things. I have a slightly-modified version of the TTF -- I basically flipped a bit in the metadata to get PuTTY to recognize it as a fixed-width font.

I have no idea how to make Wine aware of it, though.

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