vbf

a visual bitmap font format. you can edit a .vbf font with a text editor like its ASCII art (recommend you use a monospaced font with a 2:1 ratio)

uppercase alpha is very
similar to uppercase A
so lets use the same 
for both             +------------------+
+------------------+ |               U+0|  
| U+0041, U+0391   | |042,U+0392        |  
|------------------| |------------------|   +------------+
|                  | |                  |   |   U+0044   |
|      XXXXXX      | |  XXXXXXXXXX      |   |------------|
|    XX      XX    | |  XX        XX    |   |  XXXX      |
|  XX          XX  | |  XX          XX  |   |  XX  XX    |
|  XX          XX  | |  XX          XX  |   |  XX    XX  |
|  XX          XX  | |  XX          XX  |   |  XX    XX  |
|  XX          XX  | |  XX        XX    |   |  XX    XX  |
|  XXXXXXXXXXXXXX  | |  XXXXXXXXXX      |   |  XX    XX  |
|  XX          XX  | |  XX        XX    |   |  XX  XX    |
|  XX          XX  | |  XX          XX  |   |  XXXX      |
|  XX          XX  | |  XX          XX  |   +------------+
|  XX          XX  | |  XX          XX  |   "daa.. why is D smaller?"
|  XX          XX  | |  XX        XX    |  for the sake of example.
|  XX          XX  | |  XXXXXXXXXX      |  thats why.
|                  | |                  |
+------------------+ +------------------+

examples

glyphs are defined in floating boxes drawn with + - |. everything not in a box is ignored. pixels are drawn two characters wide: or XX

each glyph is mapped to one or more unicode sequences (a series of U+XXXX codepoints) separated by commas. whitespace in the header box is ignored.

converting to/from psf

install the two conversion tools:

pip install vbftools

convert to/from .psf:

psf2vbf < font.psf > font.vbf
vbf2psf < font.vbf > font.psf

(note: psf requires that all glyphs are the same size)

load a psf font: setfont font.psf
show the current font: showconsolefont
compress a font: gzip font.psf
decompress a font: gunzip font.psf.gz
find fonts: man setfont
convert from bdf (using psftools): bdf2psf font.bdf convert to bdf (using console-setup): psf2bdf font.psf