# Character Map for Console Founts.



## Old_School (Feb 23, 2020)

In X, it is possible to obtain character maps for all of the installed X Founts by invoking `gucharmap`, which seems to be the equivalent of the Linucian `charmap`.
    In the Console, however, the whispers of `gucharmap` are not heard.
    Since I do a good deal of bibliographic work in myriads of languages, it would be most helpful indeed to have a charmap of each fount in the Console, with the view to adding founts to the Console for languages either partially or not at all supported by the founts supplied by FreeBSD during installation.
    Is there, then, any way to find out what characters be available in Console founts?
    By the way, to answer an objection that has arisen before, "fount" is the correct spelling of the word in English; somebody, in the 1920's or thenabouts, thought himself clever in leaving out the "u" in "fount", but, as all of us computerists know, correct spelling is important. "Font-" is, in fact, the oblique stem for the Latin nominative "fons", and no more; the hyphen proclaims that "font" cannot stand by itself, but must have a case ending attached to it. Ergo, "font" is not a word.


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## SirDice (Feb 24, 2020)

The word 'font' has been in use since 1688 for a set or type of characters. The word is derived from the French _fonte_. Fount refers to the other meaning of the word, as a basin or receptacle.

So, we talk about fonts here.


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## michael_hackson (Feb 24, 2020)

This is what grammarist has to say about it:

https://grammarist.com/usage/font-vs-fount/


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## Old_School (Feb 24, 2020)

Hah! I shall riposte in good time. "Grammarist" is an unreliable source - a poisoned fount, as it were.

Meanwhile, back to the question: can one find a charmap for console founts?


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## SirDice (Feb 24, 2020)

It's *font* here, regardless of the explanation you will come up with. It's irrelevant what the middle English spelling and/or meaning was. New words are added all the time. And existing words can get a different meaning over time. Languages evolve and are constantly changing.


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## michael_hackson (Feb 24, 2020)

Old_School said:


> Is there, then, any way to find out what characters be available in Console founts?



Check what standards the console supports, e.g., ASCII, Unicode or other.
And if you are looking for representative fontfaces in the sets you could start to hunt down fonts in bitmap.

Look into kpa's comment, Dec 31 2014, in this thread:
Thread accented-characters-on-shell.49755

Decide if sc or vt,
then go handbook:
https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/using-localization.html

There you will find a link to IANA registry @
http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets/character-sets.xhtml


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## Old_School (Feb 28, 2020)

Many thanks. System set to UTF-8.

I cannot remember how to find out to which of `sc` or `vt` the system is set.

May one use something in the command line, or does one need to look in a configuration file?


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## SirDice (Mar 5, 2020)

The default is vt(4). You can query the kern.vty sysctl(8) to verify:

```
% sysctl kern.vty
kern.vty: vt
```


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