Using bitmapped fonts (like artwiz) in Debian

I understand little of the complexity surrounding fonts in Debian (and most other Linux distributions). But I do know that to get the artwiz fonts (or other bitmapped fonts) properly installed has been challenging as the procedures to install fonts occasionally changed, and good documentation is hard to find. In 2008 I explained how to install the artwiz fonts in Ubuntu Hardy, but those guidelines have not worked for many years.

Which is a shame, because the artwiz fonts are wonderfully minimalistic. Here are a few examples:

I had given up on installing these fonts a long time ago, but recently decided to give this another try. After a good amount of searching, I found a way that seems to work, at least on this system, running Debian Testing. I suppose that this should work also on Ubuntu, Linux Mint, or other Debian derivatives (please confirm this in the comments, if this is indeed the case!).

Here is what you have to do. First, download the artwiz fonts. (There are also version that support characters used in German and Swedish here; if you download those files, change the commands below where necessary.)

Unpack the bz2 archive:

tar xvjf artwiz-aleczapka-en-1.3.tar.bz2

Move into the new directory:

cd artwiz-aleczapka-en-1.3

Inside that directory you have all the .pcf font files. Before, those were the files that you would use, but apparently Debian no longer recognises .pcf font files, only .pcf.gz files. Therefore, you have to archive these with the following command:

gzip *.pcf

Now copy the entire artwiz-aleczapka-en-1.3 directory to /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc, with root privileges. If you use Ubuntu, add sudo before each command, as Ubuntu does not use root (su).

su
mv artwiz-aleczapka-en-1.3 /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc

Move into that last directory, and create an index of the font files that X will be able to use, still with root privileges:

su
cd /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc
mkfontdir
mkfontscale

By default Debian disables bitmapped fonts. Check whether there is a link to a file called 70-no-bitmaps.conf in /etc/fonts/conf.d/ directory. If there is, delete it.

Renew your font cache, as root (su or sudo):
fc-cache -f -v

Then enable the use of bitmapped fonts, as root:

dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config

You will be asked to answer three questions. These are the choices I selected:

Then reconfigure your fontconfig settings, also as root:

dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig

Then, add the following line to ~/.xprofile (or ~/.xinitrc if you use startx), so you can use the fonts in X applications (like xterm, and xfontsel, but also dmenu):

xset fp+ "/usr/share/fonts/X11/misc/artwiz-aleczapka-en-1.3/" &

(According to this post from 2013, you should also be able to add this to /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/, but that did not work for me.)

Once all this is done, you should be able to use the artwiz fonts in any X application. To prove that this does indeed work, here is a screenshot of xfontsel, selecting the nu font, and using nu as the font in Openbox.

To use these fonts in conky, I use ${font nu:size=7} in .conkyrc just before the command or text conky should display. Thus, ${font nu:size=7}${time %H:%M} gives the following:

Artwiz fonts on Ubuntu Hardy

The artwiz fonts, a set of bitmapped ‘futuristic’ fonts, are no longer in Ubuntu’s (Hardy’s) repositories. But don’t despair! Though installing these fonts is no longer as easy as apt-getting it, installing them manually isn’t that hard.

Download the fonts from this Sourceforge page. These are the ‘improved artwiz fonts’ that should work in Gtk2 and KDE3 applications. Once you reach the download page, you’ll see there are three versions available: German (de), English (en) and Swedish (se). These are basically the same fonts, but with different language encoding support (think ü, ö, etc.). You’ll only need one of them; pick the one you like.

If you want full ISO-8859-1 support, you can also use the artwiz latin1 fonts.

Extract the archive and move the extracted folder to /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc (the examples below use the English (en) font set)

tar xvjf artwiz-aleczapka-en-1.3.tar.bz2
sudo mv artwiz-aleczapka-en-1.3 /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc

Renew your font cache:

sudo fc-cache -f -v

Reconfigure your fontconfig settings:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig

Enable the use of bitmapped fonts:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config

Answer the questions as follows. First select the font tuning method (I chose Native):

Set the subpixel rendering of the fonts to ‘Automatic’:

And finally, enable bitmapped fonts:

Once you have restarted X, you should be able to use the artwiz fonts in your Gtk, Qt and Openbox settings.

If you want to use the artwiz fonts in conky, you no longer have to disable xft. To display conky with the artwiz font snap, use the following settings:

use_xft yes
font snap-7

Finally, if you want the artwiz fonts to also show up in xfontsel, specify the path to your artwiz fonts in the “Files” section of your /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Here is what that section looks like on this computer:

Section "Files"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/X11/util"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi/:unscaled"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi/:unscaled"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/X11/Type1"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/X11/misc/artwiz-aleczapka-en-1.3/"
EndSection

Restart X, and you should be able to select them in xfontsel.

Thanks to Ubuntugeek and the Ubuntu Wiki.