this small collection of bdf fonts was originally based on the prestel teletext monospace font used in the early 1980s on british teletext pages and subsequently on acorn bbc microcomputers as “mode 7”. this font was designed for maximum clarity and readability on low-resolution devices, and therefore makes an excellent choice if, like me, you want to have as much text on-screen as possible while maintaining clarity.
it includes a monospace font, dogfixed, and a proportional font, dogsans. there are bold versions of both fonts but italic only for the proportional - it doesn't make much sense to have an italic monospace font imho. there is only one size, as there was with the original prestel font: a 6x11 cell, which corresponds to about 10pt on a 75dpi device.
each of these typefaces exists in several encodings, primarily unicode and also some of the more common iso8859 encodings: currently latin-1, latin-2, latin-9, cyrillic, greek, hebrew, and arabic. the set of unicode glyphs is not complete - notably, no asian characters are available. this is due to the fact that few of these characters fit into the 6x11 bitmap grid, and is therefore unlikely to change.
you can get the current version of the dogfonts package as a gzipped tar here. to install (for xfree86), just untar into a directory, run mkfontdir in that directory, and ensure the directory is listed in a FontPath entry in the Files section of your XF86Config file.
a few screenshots are de rigeur these days, so here are a few images of galeon displaying various international webpages: české noviny, газета.ru, μακεδονικο πρακτορειο ειδησεων, and הארץ.
in order to make use of a unicode font, you need software that can handle unicode encodings. most browsers can do this these days, and you can choose dogfont encodings to render various encoding types in mozilla and so forth. mlterm is a unicode x terminal emulator, vim versions 6 and up can handle multibyte encodings, and mutt can be compiled with multibyte support. many curses or ncurses-based programs can be compiled against libncursesw for this kind of support. the beauty of doing so is that you can then just set your locale to a utf-8 encoding (for instance) and enjoy the benefits of in-place rendering and editing of any of the supported unicode blocks: for instance, here's the source code for this html page under construction (note the text for the international screenshot links).
as ever, if you don't like something, don't just sit there and get grumpy about it, and if you do like it, share the joy: mail me and tell me about it.
