Enable Bitmap Fonts on Ubuntu Jaunty

April 11th, 2009 • , , • View Comments

I like to use tiny bitmap fonts like MonteCarlo for programming, but by default Ubuntu has bitmap font support turned off.  From (at least) Gutsy through to Intrepid, this method worked for enabling bitmap font support, but after installing the Jaunty beta I found this no longer works.

Luckily, after a brief look in /etc/fonts, I found that font configuration now follows the nice pattern of a conf.avail directory containing all the available configuration parts, and conf.d containing symlinks to these parts.  This makes enabling bitmap fonts even simpler now:

# "Un-disable" bitmap fonts
sudo rm /etc/fonts/conf.d/70-no-bitmaps.conf
# Clear the font cache
sudo fc-cache -f -v

Now you should be able to drop bitmap (i.e. PCF) fonts into ~/.fonts as you would with TTF fonts and be able to use them with no extra hassle.

Update: Andreas asked in the comments if there was a way to do this that doesn’t require root access. In fact there is! If you copy /etc/fonts/conf.avail/70-force-bitmaps.conf to ~/.fonts.conf then it has the same effect. (If you already have a ~/.fonts.conf then you’ll want to merge them together – copy everything inside <fontconfig>...</fontconfig> from 70-force-bitmaps.conf and put it just before </fontconfig> in ~/.fonts.conf)

View Comments to “Enable Bitmap Fonts on Ubuntu Jaunty”

  1. Mikee says:
    April 19, 2009 at 8:45 pm

    Thank you, this worked perfectly! :)

  2. Thomas Mittelstaedt says:
    May 1, 2009 at 1:09 am

    Thanks, man. I started to get nervous at this upgrade from intrepid to jaunty!!

  3. Brad says:
    May 13, 2009 at 4:40 am

    THANK YOU! I can get my MiscFixed back in Jaunty now! ^_^ My terminal felt so strange without it…

  4. Happy says:
    June 10, 2009 at 4:57 pm

    Works perfect on Ubuntu 9.04, thank you very much!!! You’re great! I was looking for this for hours…

  5. brandon says:
    August 19, 2009 at 6:59 pm

    Much thanks!! I can’t breathe without my Dina bitmap font…

  6. crankycoder.com » Links for October 5th says:
    October 5, 2009 at 3:01 pm

    [...] Enable Bitmap Fonts on Ubuntu Jaunty « Digital Ambulation – [...]

  7. Using Bitmap fonts in Ubuntu | edward's few and rare thoughts says:
    November 5, 2009 at 5:15 pm

    [...] The original post is here: http://www.alanbriolat.co.uk/2009/04/enable-bitmap-fonts-on-ubuntu-jaunty/ [...]

  8. falen says:
    January 5, 2010 at 3:17 pm

    Man…I still can’t believe how easy it was. I spent hours yesterday looking for a solution on how to install that damn fonts and all it took was removing one file. Your solution puts all those so called HOW TOs to shame. Cheers, buddy.

  9. Andreas L. says:
    June 15, 2010 at 10:06 am

    This is of course just fine on self-administered systems.

    I’m just curious whether there’d also be a way for users to enable bitmap-fonts (for their X11-clients) without root privileges.

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