One of the problems I have with the Bat Client is that the fonts available are not quite as nice as those that I use on my xterms (i.e. for tinyfuge).

This might not seem like a big problem, there are lots of fonts to choose from and, while I might not like them as much as the fonts that I use elsewhere, they are definately good enough.

Well, it's not a big problem. However, it really does make a bit of a difference because Bat is presented entirely in text. I have some basic triggers in TF that colour and highlight various things, and, of course, some things come highlighted and coloured directly from Bat. In a party in particular, a lot of text tends to scroll past quite quickly. I really like to be able to see the text easily, notice the difference between bold and normal text, have a decent amount on the screen at one time etc etc.

Ok, so now on to some actually useful information.

The Bat Client fonts are those that are available to Java. All of them.

Java can use any Postscript Type1 and TrueType fonts that it finds on the system. This means that it will probably pick up a whole bunch of fonts from a system's font path. For my Unix box it seems it finds fonts in subdirectories of /usr/local/lib/X11/fonts.

The fonts that I have are installed as packages for X11. For example, I have recently added a freefonts-ttf package containing some TrueType fonts.

In addition to these fonts, the Java run time (JRE) also came with a small selection of standard TrueType fonts. These are in the jre/lib/fonts directory of my Java installation. These fonts are:

LucidaBright, LucidaSans and LucidaTypewriter (plus bold and oblique versions)

Java uses a mapping of logical fonts to physical fonts. By default, the mapping of logical fonts will probably be to these Lucida fonts that are supplied with Java (see fontconfig.properties.src)

Where this has some bearing on font selection, and why I was a bit disappointed with the fonts I have, is that there are actually not that many nice looking monospaced fonts available (on my system).

The Logical fonts: Dialog Input, MonoSpaced are mapped to LucidaTypewriter.

In addition I also have some other mono spaced fonts: Bitstream vera sans mono, Courier and Courier 10 pitch, Free Mono, Luxi Mono and Nimbus and Nimbus Mono L.

So I have a total of 8 monospaced fonts. Sadly, a couple of these don't seem to render very well (Free Mono and Nimbus) and Nimbus Mobo L is oblique (italic).

This is not too bad. LucidaTypewriter, Bitstream Vera Sans Mono and Luxi Mono are all quite nice looking at sizes 18+. However, the end effect is just not quite as good as the 100dpi fonts that I use with X11. A shame, but not the end of the world.

Tim