[TriLUG] Font encoding?

[Phil Smith]

Try (install xlsfonts if not already installed):

xlsfonts -llm | grep 'FONT '    # note the space after FONT

produces hundreds of lines on my systems like:

FONT                  -misc-fixed-bold-r-normal--17-120-100-100-c-100-iso8859-16
FONT                  -misc-fixed-bold-r-normal--17-120-100-100-c-100-iso8859-2
FONT                  -misc-fixed-bold-r-normal--17-120-100-100-c-100-iso8859-2
FONT                  -misc-fixed-bold-r-normal--17-120-100-100-c-100-iso8859-3

Assuming this isn't exactly what you're looking for, just run xlsfonts -llm (or -lllm) and there are many lines of information for each font including a few names for each font.  On separate lines there are "ENCODING: ISO8859" and "ENCODING NUMBER: 16", which is a repeat of the above info. 

For Unicode fonts, the entire concept is different, instead, the question is, which Unicode characters does a font contain, and there is nothing to stop a font from containing glyphs from multiple unrelated languages as well as various math/currency/miscellaneous symbols.   

I recently found that fonts might be dynamically merged: a xfce4-terminal with "Monospace" font selected noticed I had installed a new web font (converted to .OTF) and dynamically changed a box containing the previously undisplayable unicode glyph (a box with the hex values of the character) to the correct glyph from the newly installed 'Universalia' font.  The display of the terminal actually changed in real time when the new font was installed.  Since xfce4-terminal uses the common VTE library I would assume perhaps Gnome shell, KDE Konsole, etc. may also have this  ability.  I'm not sure if a mapping from Monospace-->Universalia was created or if "Monospace" now refers to multiple fixed-width fonts providing different parts of the 64K Unicode character set.

Phil