xfontsel [-toolkitoption ...] [-pattern fontname] [-print]
[-sample text] [-sample16 text16] [-noscaled]
The xfontsel(1) application provides a simple way to display the fonts known to your X server, examine samples of each, and retrieve the X Logical Font Description ("XLFD") full name for a font.
If -pattern is not specified, all fonts with XLFD 14-part names will be selectable. To work with only a subset of the fonts, specify -pattern, followed by a partially or fully qualified font name; for example, "-pattern *medium*" will select the subset of fonts that contain the string "medium" somewhere in their font name. Be careful about escaping wildcard characters in your shell.
The xfontsel(1) command takes the following options:
If you click any pointer button in one of the XLFD field names, a menu of the currently known possibilities for that field will pop up. If previous choices of other fields were made, only values for fonts that matched the previously selected fields will be selectable; to make other values selectable, you must deselect some other field(s) by choosing the "*" entry in that field. Unselectable values can be omitted from the menu entirely as a configuration option; see the ShowUnselectable resource, below. Whenever any change is made to a field value, xfontsel(1) will assert ownership of the PRIMARY_FONT selection. Other applications (such as xterm(1)) can then retrieve the selected font specification.
Scalable fonts come back from the server with zero for the pixel size, point size, and average width fields. Selecting a font name with a zero in these positions results in an implementation-dependent size. Any pixel or point size can be selected to scale the font to a particular size. Any average width can be selected to anamorphically scale the font (although you might find this challenging given the size of the average width menu).
Clicking the left pointer button in the select widget will cause the currently selected font name to become the PRIMARY text selection as well as the PRIMARY_FONT selection. This allows you to paste the string into other applications. The select button remains highlighted to remind you of this fact, and becomes unhighlighted when some other application takes the PRIMARY selection away. The select widget is a toggle; pressing it when it is highlighted will cause xfontsel(1) to release the selection ownership and unhighlight the widget. Activating the select widget twice is the only way to cause xfontsel(1) to release the PRIMARY_FONT selection.
Most of the significant parts of the widget hierarchy are documented in the app-defaults file (normally /usr/X11R5/lib/app-defaults/XFontSel).
Sufficiently ambiguous patterns can be misinterpreted and lead to an initial selection string that might not correspond to what the user intended and that can cause the initial sample text output to fail to match the proffered string. Selecting any new field value will correct the sample output, though possibly resulting in no matching font.
Should be able to return a FONT for the PRIMARY selection, not just a STRING.
Any change in a field value will cause xfontsel(1) to assert ownership of the PRIMARY_FONT selection. Perhaps this should be parameterized.
When running a slow computer, it is possible for the user to request a field menu before the font names have been completely parsed. An error message indicating a missing menu is printed to stderr, but nothing bad (or good) happens.
The average-width menu is too large to be useful.
xrdb(1)
xfd(1)