hey ldp.
maybe a couple tips to help you in your exploration. skip whatever parts you know already.
(this is pretty much a long-winded rehash of what curaga and others have posted above)
the arch wiki has some good documentation. often times i find myself there.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fontsthe differences to Core aren't that many. (coz' Core is really stripped down, the major
difficulties are finding which extension the command you want is packaged in, and how to make
your adjustments persistent).
I've only experimented with bitmap fonts so I can't help you with console fonts,TTF or other
font systems. (TTF for example requires an understanding of fontconfig).
bitmap fonts are screen fonts for X and usually have the file extension pcf, pcf.gz, or bdf. pcf
and pcf.gz are fairly ready to use on your system - you just need to tell X where they are. the
terminal command xlsfonts will list the fonts that X sees at the moment and their aliases. you
can use these in the .Xdefaults file, for example, to set the font in your terminal emulator.
other programs have other ways to configure their fonts.
the repository does have a couple packages with additional bitmap fonts but my experience with them
is that they don't quite work out of the box. you can use a keyword search for fonts and then look
in the file listing for pcf or pcf.gz files. ones that come to mind are schumacher-clean-fonts.tcz
and xfonts-unifont.tcz. time permitting, i'll also upload an extension or two.
once you load the font extension. you'll have to run mkfontscale and mkfontdir on or in the directory your new fonts are in.
if this directory already has a fonts.dir or fonts.scale file you'll have to
rm these (and sudo where appropriate). mkfontdir and mkfontscale are found in Xorg-7.6-bin.tcz, etc.
next you'll have to tell X to see them by running:
xset +fp /path/to/fonts
(you can skip this if the directory is in your font path, xset -q will tell you)
xset fp rehash
if you've got X running, you'll most likely have xset already (it's found in Xlibs.tcz or
Xorg-7.x-bin.tcz).
xlsfonts will tell you if X sees the new fonts.
I haven't found a way to autogenerate fonts.alias yet, and have been editing it by hand. the format
is pretty simple, and nothing's blown up yet(i think).
you can make these changes persistent by adding fonts.dir, fonts.scale, and fonts.alias to
/opt/.filetool.lst (make sure you prepend the appropriate path)
you'll also have to add the xset commands to a script in your ~/.X.d directory.
this will load the fonts for that login name (to make it universal you'll probably have to put
them somewhere like bootlocal.sh or bootsync.sh - not sure)
contrary to what curaga said before, i've found lots of bitmap fonts on the net, the source links
of font packages in the arch user repository are a good start. (this is probably just a matter
of perception tho.)
to use them you can
a) make an extension with them and proceed as above (if you do submit pls pack fonts.dir,
fonts.scale, and font.alias with it, but make sure they don't conflict with existing ones.)
b) just download it to ~/.fonts and run the same commands as above on this directory.
these fonts will only be available to that user.
finally if you find .bdf files (the source format for bitmap fonts) you can convert them to
pcf files with the bdftopcf command (found in Xorg-7.5-bin.tcz but not Xorg-7.6-bin.tcz for some
reason).
Hope that helped a little. Questions, clarifications, corrections and addendums are all welcome.
cheerio,
solorin
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