''misc-fixed'' is a collection of monospace

bitmap In computing, a bitmap is a mapping from some domain (for example, a range of integers) to bits. It is also called a bit array or bitmap index. As a noun, the term "bitmap" is very often used to refer to a particular bitmapping application: th ...

fonts In metal typesetting, a font is a particular size, weight and style of a typeface. Each font is a matched set of type, with a piece (a " sort") for each glyph. A typeface consists of a range of such fonts that shared an overall design. In mod ...

that is distributed with the

X Window System The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting ...

. It is a set of independent bitmap fonts which—apart from all being sans-serif fonts—cannot be described as belonging to a single font family. The misc-fixed fonts were the first fonts available for the

. Their individual origin is not attributed, but it is likely that many of them were created in the early or mid 1980s as part of

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

Project Athena Project Athena was a joint project of MIT, Digital Equipment Corporation, and IBM to produce a campus-wide distributed computing environment for educational use. It was launched in 1983, and research and development ran until June 30, 1991. , A ...

, or at its industrial partner, DEC. The misc-fixed fonts are in the public domain. The individual fonts in the collection have a short name that matches their respective pixel dimensions, plus a letter that indicates a

bold In typography, emphasis is the strengthening of words in a text with a font in a different style from the rest of the text, to highlight them. It is the equivalent of prosody stress in speech. Methods and use The most common methods in ...

oblique Oblique may refer to: * an alternative name for the character usually called a slash (punctuation) ( / ) *Oblique angle, in geometry * Oblique triangle, in geometry * Oblique lattice, in geometry * Oblique leaf base, a characteristic shape of the ...

variant. They can also be accessed using their (much longer)

X Logical Font Description X logical font description (XLFD) is a font standard used by the X Window System. Modern X software typically relies on the newer Fontconfig system instead, but XLFDs are still supported in current X window implementations for compatibility with ...

string: The "6x13" font is usually also available under the alias "fixed", a font name that is expected to be available on every X server. The fonts originally covered only the

ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because ...

repertoire, and were in the early 1990s extended to cover all characters in

ISO 8859-1 ISO/IEC 8859-1:1998, ''Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 1: Latin alphabet No. 1'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 1 ...

. In 1997, Markus Kuhn initiated and headed a project to extend the misc-fixed fonts to as large a subset of

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

ISO 10646 ISO is the most common abbreviation for the International Organization for Standardization. ISO or Iso may also refer to: Business and finance * Iso (supermarket), a chain of Danish supermarkets incorporated into the SuperBest chain in 2007 * Is ...

as is feasible for each of the available font sizes. This project's goal was to get Linux developers interested in abandoning the 1990s dominant

encoding, in favour of using

UTF-8 UTF-8 is a variable-length character encoding used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode'' (or ''Universal Coded Character Set'') ''Transformation Format 8-bit''. UTF-8 is capable of ...

instead, which happened indeed within a few years. Thanks to this effort, all the misc fixed fonts now cover the characters found in *

ISO 8859 ISO/IEC 8859 is a joint ISO and IEC series of standards for 8-bit character encodings. The series of standards consists of numbered parts, such as ISO/IEC 8859-1, ISO/IEC 8859-2, etc. There are 15 parts, excluding the abandoned ISO/IEC 8859-12 ...

parts 1-5, 7-10, 13-15 (i.e., all parts except Arabic and Thai) * ISO 6937 and the CEN MES-1 European Unicode Subset * IBM/

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation, multinational technology company, technology corporation producing Software, computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at th ...

code pages CP

437 __NOTOC__ Year 437 ( CDXXXVII) was a common year starting on Friday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. At the time, it was known as the Year of the Consulship of Aetius and Sigisvultus (or, less frequently, year 119 ...

, 850, 1251, 1252, and many others *

/ Adobe Systems

Windows Glyph List 4 Windows Glyph List 4, or more commonly WGL4 for short, also known as the ''Pan-European character set'', is a character repertoire on Microsoft operating systems comprising 657 Unicode characters, two of them private use. Its purpose is to provide ...

(WGL4) *

KOI8-R KOI8-R (RFC 1489) is an 8-bit character encoding, derived from the KOI-8 encoding by the programmer Andrei Chernov in 1993 and designed to cover Russian, which uses a Cyrillic alphabet. KOI8-R was based on Russian Morse code, which was create ...

* DEC

VT100 The VT100 is a video terminal, introduced in August 1978 by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). It was one of the first terminals to support ANSI escape codes for cursor control and other tasks, and added a number of extended codes for special ...

graphics symbols The 6x13, 8x13, 9x15, 9x18, and 10x20 fonts cover a much larger repertoire, that covers in addition the comprehensive CEN MES-3A European Unicode 3.2 subset, the International Phonetic Alphabet,

Armenian Armenian may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Armenia, a country in the South Caucasus region of Eurasia * Armenians, the national people of Armenia, or people of Armenian descent ** Armenian Diaspora, Armenian communities across the ...

, Georgian, Thai, Yiddish, all

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power ...

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

, and Cyrillic characters, all

mathematical symbols A mathematical symbol is a figure or a combination of figures that is used to represent a mathematical object, an action on mathematical objects, a relation between mathematical objects, or for structuring the other symbols that occur in a formula ...

(including the entire

TeX Tex may refer to: People and fictional characters * Tex (nickname), a list of people and fictional characters with the nickname * Joe Tex (1933–1982), stage name of American soul singer Joseph Arrington Jr. Entertainment * ''Tex'', the Italian ...

repertoire), APL,

Braille Braille (Pronounced: ) is a tactile writing system used by people who are visually impaired, including people who are blind, deafblind or who have low vision. It can be read either on embossed paper or by using refreshable braille display ...

Runes Runes are the letters in a set of related alphabets known as runic alphabets native to the Germanic peoples. Runes were used to write various Germanic languages (with some exceptions) before they adopted the Latin alphabet, and for specialised ...

, and much more. 9x15 and 10x20 also cover Ethiopic. The misc-fixed fonts have been much less commonly used since support for scalable outline font formats such as Type 1,

TrueType TrueType is an outline font standard developed by Apple in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. It has become the most common format for fonts on the classic Mac OS, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating ...

and

OpenType OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. It was built on its predecessor TrueType, retaining TrueType's basic structure and adding many intricate data structures for prescribing typographic behavior. OpenType is a registered trademark ...

has become available for X. However, they are still commonly used with

terminal emulator A terminal emulator, or terminal application, is a computer program that emulates a video terminal within some other display architecture. Though typically synonymous with a shell or text terminal, the term ''terminal'' covers all remote ter ...

s, such as

xterm In computing, xterm is the standard terminal emulator for the X Window System. It allows users to run programs which require a command-line interface. If no particular program is specified, xterm runs the user's shell. An X display can sho ...

, and as a fallback font for the many Unicode characters not yet found in common outline fonts. The fonts are distributed in the BDF format and are currently maintained by Markus Kuhn.

References

External links

Simon Tatham's Fonts Page
has, amongst other things, a Windows .FON bitmap font of the "fixed" (i.e. 6x13) font.
"Rasher's Rockbox related stuff - Fonts - misc"
has all sizes of fixed-misc available as images and downloads in a .fnt format. {{Monospaced fonts Monospaced typefaces X Window System Typefaces and fonts introduced in 1984 Raster typefaces