Genera X11 Fonts on Mac

Sun, 03 Jul 2016 17:50:53 +0000

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.

Xquartz on Symbolics LISP Engineering

Genera X11 Fonts on Mac