Terminus Font Home Page

Terminus Font Home Page

About

Terminus Font is a clean, fixed width bitmap font, designed for long (8 and more hours per day) work with computers. Version 4.36 contains 856 characters, covers about 120 language sets and supports ISO8859-1/2/5/7/9/13/15/16, Paratype-PT154/PT254, KOI8-R/U/E/F, Esperanto, many IBM, Windows and Macintosh code pages, as well as the IBM VGA, vt100 and xterm pseudographic characters.

The sizes present are 6x12, 8x14, 8x16, 10x18, 10x20, 11x22, 12x24, 14x28 and 16x32.
The styles are normal and bold (except for 6x12), plus EGA/VGA-bold for 8x14 and 8x16.

Screenshots (with ao2 and gq2 applied)

Changes

Version 4.36:

Removed the rarely used cm2 variant.
Added new ll2 variant with more distinctive l.
Added quotereversed (201B), quotedblreversed (201F), I/i/U/u dotbelow (1ECA, 1ECB, 1EE4, 1EE5).
Moved all quotes and alike in size 32 one line down.
Small fixes and improvements (t commaaccent, quotes alignment etc. in some sizes).
Windows installation: creates the relevant registry key.

Version 4.35:

Added hi2 variant for size 18.
Fixes in size 18: normal V, normal W, bold X, H stroke, some pseudographic characters and the *NIX installation.

Version 4.34: (removed due to bugs)

Added size 10x18.
Small fixes and improvements in section, multiply, Eng, eng, Dje, dje, house, male, infinity, zeta and various other characters in the different sizes.
The default cyrillic ghe is now ge1, with ge2 available as variant.

Version 4.32:

Slightly more distintive normal M and W.
Rounded 28-bold, 32-normal, 32-bold.
Also removed the 32-normal kx2 style.
Small changes: Che/che stroke, phi, Zhe/zhe etc.
Linux console: the default bold is now framebuffer.
Smaller Makefile, GNU make required.
Changed the font license to SIL OFL 1.1.
It's FSF approved, no need to worry.
And, as you can see, Terminus Font is now on sourceforge.

Version 4.30:

Added size 22 (not very good).
Added nother 25 characters.
Various small fixes and improvements.
Changed the default prefix and x11dir.

Version 4.28:

Heavy frames (written mostly by Tim Allen) and a few more letters.
Altered trianges and arrows, small bugfixes.
Reorganized the 512-character console font to include more letters instead of the IBM-437 specific pseudographics.

Character variants

ao1 => ao2 - nice, but sometimes hard to distinguish from 'o'.

dv2 => dv1 - due to character matrix limitations, the printing de and ve are of slightly worse quality.

ge1 => ge2 - may be applied for Bulgarian, Russian etc.

gq1 => gq2 - some programs still use ` and ' as single quotes.

ij2 => ij1 (also short i)

ka1 => ka2 - the high cyrillic ka is used as decorative in Bulgaria; the latin 'k' is always high, of course.

ll1 => ll2 - should pass the il1I test (depends on your resolution and monitor quality), but the horizontal alignment is a bit worse.

hi1 => hi2 - higher upper case letters, digits etc. for size 18 - looks better, but there is even less space between the lines.

Download

Unix/Linux source

Windows installer

View all files

Linux binary packages: check your distribution repository.

Frequently asked questions:

Q. Italic version?

A. No. The quality is significantly lower, and preserving the font width requires overlapping characters, which are not handled very well by X11/Xft. Anyway, the modern GUIs support automatic slanting; if you are not satisfied with it, try mkitalic from FreeBSD or bdfslant from Debian.

Q. Scalable version?

A. Long story short, when the average display resolution becomes at least 150 DPI. Prefferably 200.

Q. How about some new characters?

A. Contact me and be ready to help.

Q. The bold 6x12 font...

A. ...does not exist, there is no space for a bold font in a 6x12 matrix. However, the "normal" font is somewhere between.

Q. The font works in X11/Motif, but not in GNOME/KDE/Xfce.

A. Try adding 75-yes-terminus.conf to the Fontconfig configuration files. See also: mkfontscale(1), mkfontdir(1), fc-cache(1), xorg.conf(5), xfs(1), xlsfonts(1), fonts-conf(5) etc.

Legal information

Terminus Font is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1. The license is included as OFL.TXT, and is also available with a FAQ at http://scripts.sil.org/OFL

The files configure, configure.help, bdftopsf.pl, ucstoany.pl, fcp.c and terminus.nsi are distributed under the GNU General Public License version 2.0 or (at your choice) any later version.

THE END