This page discusses using special DEC or VMS fonts
on the ViewStation.
Handling Special DEC or VMS Fonts
There are two sides to this problem, first, preparing DEC fonts for
the HDS ViewStation, and second, preparing any special fonts (such as
Open Windows fonts) for display on the VAX.
Preparing DEC Fonts
DEC fonts typically reside in a "sysfont" directory belonging
to the root user. The ViewStation can use .pcf, .bdf, or .snf font
files directly (it can also use the X11R5 font server if one is
available). This is sufficient flexibility that it is unlikely that you
have to do anything to the DEC fonts to use them on the ViewStation.
If you have to convert fonts, there should be .bdf fonts for
all the DEC fonts. In most cases these fonts duplicate the X11R5 fonts
available with the MIT X distribution, however they may have slightly
different names, and there may be some proprietary fonts supplied by
DEC. A little investigation of fonts that cannot be loaded often shows
the problem and a simple alias for the font name is a good solution.
If you have proprietary DEC fonts in an incompatible format,
you must compile them in the HDS ViewStation .snf format, but that
compilation must be done on a Unix or Ultrix host. These fonts can be
moved to the TCP/IP part of the network as .bdf fonts and converted
with the "bdftohds" utility program (see page bdfto960
Font Utility Program). The resulting .snf fonts can then be moved
back to the DECnet side or retained on the TCP side, since the
ViewStation can access fonts from any host.
Preparing Other Special Fonts
The second situation, that of compiling other fonts for use on the
VMS server, is also straightforward. This example shows how to convert
Sun Open Windows fonts for use on the DEC VMS server.
Go to
the source of the special fonts and copy them to the DEChost:
sun> cd $OPENWINHOME/share/src/fonts/misc
sun> dnicp *.bdf decvax::[vaxdir]
then, on the decvax machine, compile them with the
"font" utility:
$ font olcursor.bdf
$ font olglyph10.bdf
This results in fonts with file names in the form
"olglyph10.decw$font;1". Now copy the fonts to the "sysfont" directory
(you must have system privileges to do this): $ set def
sys$sysroot: [sysfont.decw.user_cursor16]
$ copy [vaxdir]
olcursor.decw$font;1 *
(note: the Lucida fonts should be put in
[sysfont.decw.user_75dpi] and sysfont.decw.user_100dpi]
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