Spleen

Spleen is a monospaced bitmap font available in 6 sizes:

• 5x8
• 6x12
• 8x16
• 12x24
• 16x32
• 32x64

Each size is provided in the Glyph Bitmap Distribution Format (BDF), and release tarballs contain the fonts in the following formats: PCF, PSF (for the Linux console), and OTF.

All font sizes contain all ISO/IEC 8859-1 characters (Basic Latin and Latin-1 Supplement Unicode block), Latin Extended-A characters, as well as Box Drawing, Block Elements, and Braille Patterns Unicode blocks, except for the 5x8 and the 6x12 versions.

Due to character size constraints, the 5x8 version only contains printable ASCII characters, the Braille Patterns Unicode block, and light Box Drawing characters. Please also note that there is no OpenType version for this size.

As of Spleen 1.8.0, there is now a 6x12 version containing the same Unicode blocks as the 5x8 version and the Latin-1 Supplement Unicode block.

Spleen also has support for Powerline symbols out of the box.

The font name is a reference to Baudelaire.

Screenshots

The following screenshots show Spleen 16x32 displaying code and prose.

ASCII characters for all sizes:

Spleen 5x8:

Spleen 6x12:

Spleen 8x16:

Spleen 12x24:

Spleen 16x32:

Spleen 32x64:

XLFD font names

-misc-spleen-medium-r-normal--8-80-72-72-c-50-iso10646-1
-misc-spleen-medium-r-normal--12-120-72-72-c-60-iso10646-1
-misc-spleen-medium-r-normal--16-160-72-72-c-80-iso10646-1
-misc-spleen-medium-r-normal--24-240-72-72-c-120-iso10646-1
-misc-spleen-medium-r-normal--32-320-72-72-c-160-iso10646-1
-misc-spleen-medium-r-normal--64-640-72-72-c-320-iso10646-1

Packages

Packages are available for the following operating systems:

• OpenBSD
• NetBSD
• FreeBSD
• Arch Linux
• Void Linux
• Nix
• Debian
• Ubuntu

Manual installation

*BSD and Linux

Clone the repository, convert the files to the Portable Compiled Format (PCF) using bdftopcf and run mkfontdir in the directory.

Alternatively, release tarballs provide PCF files for each size.

macOS

macOS users should use the .otf files provided in the release tarballs.

Since version 1.7.0, .dfont files are not generated anymore.

Windows

Windows users should use the .otf files provided in the release tarballs.

Usage

*BSD and Linux

Update the font path to include Spleen:

xset +fp /usr/local/share/fonts/spleen/

Update .Xdefaults and add one of the following directives:

xterm*faceName: spleen:pixelsize=8:antialias=false
xterm*faceName: spleen:pixelsize=12:antialias=false
xterm*faceName: spleen:pixelsize=16:antialias=false
xterm*faceName: spleen:pixelsize=24:antialias=false
xterm*faceName: spleen:pixelsize=32:antialias=false
xterm*faceName: spleen:pixelsize=64:antialias=false

Launch xterm.

Ubuntu has bitmap fonts support disabled by default, instructions to enable it are available here.

Linux console

Release tarballs provide PSF files for each size, setfont can be used to load and set the desired font.

NetBSD console

NetBSD has .fnt files for each size which can be loaded using wsfontload(8).

For example, to load Spleen 16x32:

wsfontload -N spleen-16x32 -w 16 -h 32 /usr/share/wscons/fonts/spleen-16x32.fnt
wsconsctl -dw font=spleen-16x32

FreeBSD console

The FreeBSD package contains .fnt files which can be loaded using vidcontrol(1).

For example, to load Spleen 16x32:

vidcontrol -f /usr/local/share/fonts/spleen/spleen-16x32.fnt

OpenType versions

Spleen release tarballs now contains OTF versions generated automatically from the BDF files, using bdf2sfd. Each font has a different name, allowing them to be installed alongside.

They should be used in the exact size specified below, with anti-aliasing disabled.

• Spleen 6x12: 9 Pt (12 pixels)
• Spleen 8x16: 12 Pt (16 pixels)
• Spleen 12x24: 18 Pt (24 pixels)
• Spleen 16x32: 24 Pt (32 pixels)
• Spleen 32x64: 48 Pt (64 pixels)

License

Spleen is released under the BSD 2-Clause license. See LICENSE file for details.

Author

Spleen is developed by Frederic Cambus.

• Site: https://www.cambus.net

Resources

GitHub: https://github.com/fcambus/spleen

Trivia

• Spleen is the default font for OpenBSD consoles since January 2019
• Spleen was imported in the NetBSD src tree in March 2019