vt(4) "newcons" and 80x25 vty? (tested: 10.1-BETA2)

[Ed Maste]

On 25 September 2014 18:51,  <beeessdee at ruggedinbox.com> wrote:
>
> For longer term, when there is time, I like to hack on font system for
> other goals in my previous mail:  Smooth fonts sized right at native/max
> resolution provided with new(ish) kms driver stack.  What a waste to stick
> to vgamode.  Any pointers toward where I should start?  Documentation is
> scarcer than the usual FreeBSD (not a criticism - it is new subsystem!).

In fact, good documentation is even more important for new subsystems.
Anyhow, as a result of your comment I noticed that a vtfontcvt(8)
cross-reference was missing from vt(4); it's now added to HEAD in
r273332.

I've also put a quick example in the wiki
(https://wiki.freebsd.org/Newcons) of using vtfontcvt(8) to create a
larger console font, and include it here for feedback:

1. Fetch the Terminus font distribution and unpack it.  It's available from
http://sourceforge.net/projects/terminus-font/files/latest/download?source=files

2. Convert the 16x32 bitmap .bdf files to a vt(4) .fnt file:
% vtfontcvt -w 16 -h 32 ter-u32n.bdf ter-u32b.bdf ter-u32.fnt

3. Load it from a console window to test:
% vidcontrol -f ter-u32.fnt

On my 1920x1200 LCD this font gives me a 120x37 terminal.

A variant of Terminus is used as the default vt(4) console font, but
only the 8x16 size is available to us under a BSD license. A future
task is to integrate this with the terminus-font port, so that
installing the port or package is sufficient to make the full set of
sizes available to vt(4).

-Ed