Genera X11 Fonts on Mac

Although away, I have my laptop with me and decided to try to get Xquartz running with the Genera X11 fonts.

• Find the Genera X11 fonts (in bdf format) and transfer them to your Mac. I put them in ~/x11/fonts/genera/. On Genera system they will be in the LMFS somewhere and can be transferred using NFS.
  • If necessary: On the Mac, rename the fonts to lower case and get rid of any Genera version number. tr is good for case conversion and for i in * ; do echo $i `echo $i | sed 's/\.~.*//'` ; done works to remove version numbers. (Man, this blog software makes it difficult to put commands with backticks and backslashes into code blocks.)
• Alternatively, you can mount the ISO9660 partition of your Genera 8.3 distribution CD on the Mac using a command like mkdir /Volumes/CD ; sudo mount_cd9660 -e /dev/disk3 /Volumes/CD and then copy the bdf and other X11 font files. (By default macOS mounts the HFS partition so you will only see the MacIvory files.)
  • Add the g option to the mount_cd9660 to see the Genera version numbers appended to the filenames - but you'll have to remove these when you copy the files.
  • (Add the r option to the mount command to see the file system without Rockridge format, for curiosity sake. This also changes the version number format and makes them all caps. You can also use the j option to disable Joilet.)
  • sudo umount /Volumes/CD to unmount it; the regular diskutil unmount and other Mac utilities won't unmount this.

AdmiralA:~/x11/fonts/genera$ diskutil list  
...
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     Apple_partition_scheme                        +636.7 MB   disk3
   1:        Apple_partition_map                         32.3 KB    disk3s1
   2:          Symbolics_ISO9660                         615.4 MB   disk3s2
   3:                  Apple_HFS MacIvory Support 4.2    21.0 MB    disk3s3
...
AdmiralA:~$ ls -l /Volumes/CD/sys.sct/x11/fonts/bdf/genera/ | head -5  
total 6476  
-r-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  14302 Dec 19  1989 13fgb.bdf.~3~
-r-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  10623 Dec 19  1989 16fg.bdf.~3~
-r-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  12451 Dec 19  1989 18fg.bdf.~3~
-r-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  17481 Dec 19  1989 20vr.bdf.~3~

• In the directory with all the font files, run the mkfontdir program, which will make a file called fonts.dir which seems to contain a mapping from a filename to a font name.

AdmiralA:~/x11/fonts/genera$ mkfontdir  
AdmiralA:~/x11/fonts/genera$ fgrep genera-cptfont fonts.dir  
cptfont.bdf genera-cptfont  
cptfontb.bdf genera-cptfontb  
cptfontbi.bdf genera-cptfontbi  
cptfontc.bdf genera-cptfontc  
cptfontcb.bdf genera-cptfontcb  
cptfontcc.bdf genera-cptfontcc  
cptfonti-german.bdf genera-cptfonti-german  
cptfonti.bdf genera-cptfonti  
cptfontr.bdf genera-cptfontr  

• In the Xquartz xterm window, add this font directory to the font path (xset fp+ ~/x11/fonts/genera) and activate it (xset fp rehash).
• Using FontForge I looked at various fonts and determined that genera-cptfont seems to be the normal Genera console font.
• Test that the fonts are installed by using one: xterm -fn genera-cptfont -fb genera-cptfontb. Note that as it turns out, these two fonts are not compatible with xterm's needs (identical bounding boxes) so just use xterm -fn genera-cptfont.

• After a little Googling and reverse engineering (including looking at files in /opt/X11/lib/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d) I have determined that you can make permanent XQuartz font path changes by adding a ~/.xinitrc.d directory and one or more shell files in here. So, I created an executable ~/.xinitrc.d/10-add-genera-fonts.sh file with these commands:

xset fp+ ~/x11/fonts/genera/  
xset fp rehash  

• Just for your curiosity, here is my .Xresources related to XTerm, and how XTerm now looks when XQuartz starts up.

XTerm*saveLines: 65536  
XTerm*VT100.geometry: 100x40  
XTerm*reverseVideo: on  
XTerm*scrollBar: true  
XTerm*rightScrollBar: true