******** Fontpak v0.1 **********
People have complained that I didn't use the good context-sensitive
 diff for my patch.  Luckily, the same people supplied me with the
 proper command line to create the good diff file. So here it is. console.diff
 was created with the command "diff -C3 console.c.orig console.c".
 Otherwise this is identical to the original fontpak.

  Also, I would like to thank Joel Hoffman ( joel@wam.umd.edu ),who wrote
the original "codepage" package, which fontpak is derived from.
 
       - Jerry Kaidor ( tr2!jerry@abekas.com, jkaidor@synoptics.com )

( the original fontpak announcement follows )
----------------------------------------------------------------------------


** fontpak:  a package for editing and using screen fonts on Linux systems ***


    This is based on the "codepage" package that appeared about six months ago.
"codepage" gave one the ability to load a standard microsoft codepage file
into the VGA monitor, and have it used in the current VC.  It included 
a Hebrew font and a Russian font.

    "Fontpak" differs from "codepage" mainly in that the former package defined a new kernel service for adding and selecting the fonts.  That has been
changed to a scheme which defines an escape sequence in the character output
stream.  Use of an escape sequence gives the following advantages:

    * The changes to the kernel are limited exclusively to the console
      driver source file, /usr/src/linux/kernel/chr_drv/console.c.  No
      other file is changed.

    *  The user programs that load the fonts from disk, etc, become very
       simple, consisting entirely of file operations and printf()s.

   Fontpak also includes enough tools to allow the user to edit his own
fonts.  Which is a good thing, because right now, all I have is this
really ugly Russian font :-).

   To use fontpak:

   1)  Untar the files into /usr/src/fontpak
      ( well, actually, wherever you want them, but that's where I put them )

   2) Compile all of the .c files with gcc:
      gcc loadfont.c -o loadfont
      gcc makefont.c -o makefont
      gcc dumpfont.c -o dumpfont
      gcc usefont.c -o usefont

   3) Patch the file /usr/src/linux/kernel/chr_drv with the included difference
      file: console.dif:
       cd /usr/src/linux/kernel/chr_drv
       patch console.c < /usr/src/fontpak/console.dif
   ( The difs are against the console.c in the SLS distribution of February
     17th, 1993 )

   ( All of the additions to console.c are bracketed by #ifdef CODEPAGE-#endif
     pairs.  So they are easy to find, if you want to see how it works, or
     modify it. )

   4) Compile the kernel:
      cd /usr/src/linux
      make config
      make dep
      make clean
      ( install a floppy )	
      make disk

   5) reboot with the new kernel

   6) Load the new font:
      loadfont koi8.fnt 2  ( or 1 )

   7) Use the new font:
      usefont 2

    Note how ugly your screen got!  Now, if you go to another VC, you can see
that it's still using the default font.

    It's my hope, that people will contribute some more fonts.  This particular
one was customized by me for doing Russian email.  It obeys the "KOI-8"
standard, which is used on the Russian usenet.

    Fonts can be edited with two utilities: makefont and dumpfont.  They are
extremely simple.  dumpfont takes a binary font, and makes it into ascii
text which you can edit with any text editor.  Makefont, on the other hand,
compiles the ascii file into a binary one, suitable for loading with loadfont.
Nothing fancy, but they do the job :-).

    I'd like to give credit to the writer of "codepage", but I don't remember
his name :-(.  And he didn't put a name in _his_ readme.

                                     - Jerry Kaidor



