Contents

Introduction

The purpose of this document is to guide you on how to make xterm use a truetype font.

freetype support

First you need to compile xterm with freetype support. Assuming your pkgsrc is located in /usr/pkgsrc, you may write:

# cd /usr/pkgsrc/x11/xterm
# make PKG_OPTIONS.xterm=freetype
# make install

Note: If you want to compile every application with freetype enabled, provided it has support for it, add PKG_DEFAULT_OPTIONS+=freetype in your /etc/mk.conf file.

Choose font

First pick a font you like, from this list:

$ fc-list | col | sort | less

Note: A nice font set is Liberation. It can be found in fonts/liberation-ttf.

Run xterm

Then type:

xterm -fa 'Liberation Mono' -fs 10

~/.Xdefaults file

If you want xterm to use these font settings by default, you may add the following lines in your ~/.Xdefaults file:

XTerm*faceName: Liberation Mono
XTerm*faceSize: 10

Credits

This articled is based on a post in the BSD nexus forum.