Bug 96329

Summary:	Want more freedom in choosing fonts
Product:	[Applications] konsole	Reporter:	Erik Schnetter <schnetter>
Component:	general	Assignee:	Konsole Developer <konsole-devel>
Status:	RESOLVED NOT A BUG
Severity:	wishlist
Priority:	NOR
Version:	1.4.1
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	unspecified
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Erik Schnetter 2005-01-05 00:26:35 UTC

Version:           1.4.1 (using KDE 3.3.1,  (3.1))
Compiler:          gcc version 3.3.5 (Debian 1:3.3.5-3)
OS:                Linux (i686) release 2.6.9-1-686

I want to use a certain font in konsole.  To be specific, I want to use a font that is "semicondensed".  The X font specification for the font I want to use is

-*-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*

I cannot set this in the font selection dialogue for konsole.  There is no way to select "semicondensed".

Comment 1 Kurt Hindenburg 2005-03-14 05:18:28 UTC

Konsole uses the KFontDialog which uses the QFontDialog.  There doesn't seem to be a way to allow more fonts to be displayed.  We'll see what QT4 has....  There might be possible of allowing a command line option for setting the font...

Comment 2 Szokovacs Robert 2005-03-18 22:31:50 UTC

I'm not sure this is the right bug to comment to, but I have a similar problem, couldn't select the font I used to use after upgrading. After editing the konsolerc by hand, the font I wanted appeared in the font selecting dialog, and stayed there, even after I deleted the configuration file. However, a lots of other fonts also missing, and I don't think it must be that way, since the font configuration program in control center has the (apperantly) same KFontDialog - with tons of fonts more.

Comment 3 Kurt Hindenburg 2005-04-01 06:52:16 UTC

Read the README.fonts to see why the font must be fixed size.  That's why other apps show more fonts in their dialog (ie they allow variable-width fonts).

Comment 4 Robert Knight 2006-08-08 05:35:37 UTC

> I cannot set this in the font selection dialogue for konsole.  
> There is no way to select "semicondensed".

Terminal emulators must used fixed-width fonts because this is a very fundamental assumption used by almost all terminal-based programs.

This means that Konsole can only offer a subset of the fonts available on the system.  

Interestingly Gnome Terminal allows the user to select any font for the terminal.  Unfortunately this gives horrible results with many fonts which were not designed as fixed-width.  At least with Konsole you know that if a font shows up in the dialog box it will work.

Unfortunately there may be some fonts on your system which actually are fixed-width and could be used but don't show up on the list.  This is a problem with the software used to create the fonts, so the people to talk to are the font authors themselves.