Salut Fonts

This is a family of manually drawn bitmap fonts. Source files are in BDF format, which is simple and is still supported.

The mission of the project is to provide high quality multilingual font for applications where using of widely available vector fonts is impractical or aestetically unacceptable.

The origin of the name is the word of a latin origin with the meaning "hello" or "greeting gesture" used in some languages (French, Polish, Romanian).

Installation and usage

On a Linux graphic environment, you can install them with font installer supplied with your DE, or manually copy them to .fonts in your home directory, and then chose the font in system settings. However, some rendering libraries do not support BDF (notable case is Pango 1.44 dropped support for FreeType in favor of HarfBuzz), so you might not see bitmap fonts in some applications.

There’s a method to build OTB (open-type bitmap) font from BDF with fonttosfnt. The opentype target converts all fonts to OTB.

Also conversion to PCF is possible make target pcf does this thing to all fonts by calling bdftopsf utility.

Original inctruction: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BitmapFontConversion

8 pixel wide (8x8, 11x8, 14x8, 16x8) fonts can be installed in Linux console.

1. First, convert BDF to PSF (bdf2psf utility needed for this). make consolefonts command will do the conversion for you.

2. Then, copy psf fonts from build/consolefonts to /usr/consolefonts or whereever your distribution keeps .psf/.psf.gz files.

3. Finally use console-setup or similarly named service to configure Linux to use your font (consult your distribution manual on how to do this).

Project structure

There are several individual fonts in the family. They include:

1. Salut Sans, a proportional font for general use.

2. Salut Mono, a fixed width (monospaced) font designed for terminals.

They include several sizes and also bold and italic. The monospaced font also include extended (1.4x width) and wide (double width) variant.

Font file name consists of:

salut-sans14y.bdf
|   | |  |||| |_|__ Filename extension
|   | |  ||||______ Option letters (zero or more)
|   | |  |||_______ Size (two digits)
|   | |__|_________ Individual name (sans etc.) |_ Font name
|___|______________ Family name (always salut)  |

Option letters include:

• c - Condensed (about 0.7x wide)

• y - Semiexpanded (about 1.2x wide)

• x - Extended (about 1.4x wide)

• w - Wide (2x wide)

• b - Bold

• i - Italic

Monospace font size widths:

Height	Width
	4	6	7	8	11	12	16
8	08	08x		08w
11		11		11x	11w
12		12				12w
14			14	14y
16				16			16w
22					22

Special Aspects

Latin

Lower case g have three-storey glyph where resolution permits.

Diacritical marks

Combining diacritical marks vertical position match capital letter height. Non-combining diacritical marks match lower case letter height.

Enclosing symbols in narrow monospace fonts have squeezed or cropped forms to fit character space

Private use area

Some ranges in private use area maps characters from higher unicode planes. Mapping them back to their standard places need some work. These include:

• Range EB00 to EBFF maps range 1FB00 to 1FBFF Symbols for Legacy Computing

• Range EC00 to EEBF maps range 1CC00 to 1CEBF Symbols for Legacy Computing Supplement