[SOLVED] XTerm and the Terminus font

Question

I having difficulty getting the Terminus font to display correctly in xterm.
In .Xresources;
When I use "xterm*faceName:Terminus:style=Regular:size=10" I get missing characters, like the curly quotes in man pages.  This line is from the wiki.
When I use "xterm*font:-*-terminus-medium-*-*-*-14-*-*-*-*-*-*-*" there are no missing characters (that I've found).  However, the display output (like paging a text file, for example) is much slower.  Too slow, so I go back to the missing characters config.
One other issue I've noticed, which may be related.  When I use the control-mousebutton menus, they display very slowly taking 2 or 3 seconds to draw. This happens even without loading my .Xresources file.
Also note I'm using fontconfig-infinality-ultimate.
My complete .Xresources file:
xterm*Background:black
xterm*Foreground:white
xterm*cursorColor:green
!xterm*pointerShape:arrow
!xterm*pointerColor:blue
xterm*VT100.geometry:80x32
xterm*faceName:Terminus:style=Regular:size=10
!xterm*font:-*-terminus-medium-*-*-*-14-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
!xterm*faceName:Inconsolata:style=Regular:size=11
!xterm*font:-*-dina-medium-r-*-*-16-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
!xterm*renderFont:false
xterm*dynamicColors:true
xterm*utf8:2
xterm*eightBitInput:true
xterm*saveLines:4096
xterm*scrollKey:true
xterm*scrollTtyOutput:false
xterm*scrollBar:true
xterm*rightScrollBar:true
xterm*jumpScroll:true
xterm*multiScroll:true
xterm*toolBar:false
xterm*locale:true
xterm*termName:xterm-256color
xterm*metaSendsEscape:true
Last edited by mixer (2013-09-03 03:56:33)

Answer 1

mixer wrote:
Switching to rxvt-unicode (plus rxvt-unicode-terminfo) fixed my problem with speed and missing Terminus characters.  I'm using the setting:
URxvt*font:xft:Terminus:pixelsize=14
The part that I don't understand is, if I specify my font as follows I get all the characters but slow display:
URxvt*font:-*-terminus-medium-r-normal-*-16-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-*
You commented that this flavor (the XLFD form) is slow with both xterm and urxvt.
As I noted, the problem is in how the server handles the fonts.
urxvt's equivalent to xterm's "-fa" option is a feature introduced by konsole (a "xft:" prefix on the string).
Actually you don't get "all" of the characters.  To see this, use xfd.  The 10646 encoding appears to be the
original terminus (a small set of 256 characters) with a few others added.  But most of the 0-65535 range is
filled with a filler-character.