Question

How do I render a string in an ancient X11 bitmap font? I mean something like

-*-lucida-medium-r-normal-*-34-*-*-*-*-*-*-*

which I can find with xfontsel. I just need a command line tool etc. that displays a given string in that font. A similar TrueType font won’t work, since it has to be pixel-perfect (I’m trying to get images of each letter to OCR an image in that font).

Answer 1

I’m not sure if there is a command line tool. But you can always roll your own with Xlib and C.

Somebody seems to have written a simple X11 C program that displays a string using Xlib. Changing a couple of lines and compiling with:

gcc -lX11 -o xrenderstring xrenderstring.c

.. should do it for you.

I’ve reproduced the entire program in this gist (in case it vanishes from the original source), modified to take two arguments: 1. fontname, 2. string to be rendered.

So you’d call it like (after compiling of course):

./xrenderstring "-*-lucida-medium-r-normal-*-34-*-*-*-*-*-*-*" "Quick brown fox"