X logical font description

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X logical font description (XLFD) is a font standard used by the X window system. It is intended to support:

• unique, descriptive font names that support simple pattern matching
• multiple font vendors, arbitrary character sets, and encodings
• naming and instancing of scalable and polymorphic fonts
• transformations and subsetting of fonts
• independence of X server and operating or file system implementations
• arbitrarily complex font matching or substitution
• extensibility

One prominent XFLD convention is to refer to individual fonts including any variations using their unique FontName. It comprises a sequence of fourteen hyphen-prefixed fields:

1. FOUNDRY
2. FAMILY_NAME
3. WEIGHT_NAME
4. SLANT
5. SETWIDTH_NAME
6. ADD_STYLE_NAME
7. POINT_SIZE
8. PIXEL_SIZE
9. RESOLUTION_X
10. RESOLUTION_Y
11. SPACING
12. AVERAGE_WIDTH
13. CHARSET_REGISTRY
14. CHARSET_ENCODING

The following sample is for a 75-dpi, 12-point, Charter font:

-Bitstream-Charter-Medium-R-Normal--12-120-75-75-P-68-ISO8859-1

[edit] References

• X Logical Font Description Conventions; Version 1.5; X Consortium Standard; X Version 11, Release 6.4; Jim Flowers, Digital Equipment Corporation; Version 1.5 edited by Stephen Gildea, X Consortium, Inc.