How can I activate bitmap fonts on 20.04?

I am using Ubuntu Mate 20.04. I want to use the Fixed 6x13 font in the terminal (not xterm). When I try to change the terminal font, the Fixed fonts are not in the list of available fonts. However, mate-font-viewer and and xfontsel show the Fixed fonts.

I followed the instructions how to enable this font in How can I activate bitmap fonts? and . None of the provided solutions seems to work. This is what I did so far:

• I installed the xfonts-100dpi and xfonts-75dpi packages.
• In /etc/fonts/conf.d/ I deleted 70-no-bitmaps.conf and added the 70-yes-bitmaps.conf or 70-force-bitmaps.conf symbolic link. I tried both, one at a time.
• Following the instructions on I specifically enabled the Fixed font family by adding a 69-fixed-bitmaps.conf.
• On every trial I ran dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config, dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig and fc-cache -f and rebooted my system.

How can I use these fonts on Ubuntu 20.04?

4 Answers

Ubuntu 20.04 requires bitmap fonts to be manually enabled, and the bitmap font file must be in the OpenType Bitmap (otb) format.

Enable bitmap fonts:

$ rm /etc/fonts/conf.d/70-no-bitmaps.conf
$ ln -s ../ /etc/fonts/conf.d/
$ dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config
$ dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig
$ fc-list | grep Fixed | grep 6x13.pcf
/usr/share/fonts/X11/misc/6x13.pcf.gz: Fixed:style=SemiCondensed
/usr/share/fonts/X11/misc/trad--6x13.pcf.gz: Fixed:style=SemiCondensed

If you do not have an otb font, then it is necessary to convert from a bdf font (conversion from a pcf font will result in incorrect sizing). This conversion can be done using fonttosfnt. Unfortunately the version of fonttosfnt in Ubuntu 20.04.1 is buggy and outputs fonts with incorrect spacing (see 1, 2), so use of the latest git code is necessary.

Install latest fonttosfnt from git:

$ git clone
$ apt-get build-dep xfonts-utils
$ cd fonttosfnt
$ ./autogen.sh
$ ./configure
$ make

Download 6x13.bdf, rename to avoid collision with .pcf font, and convert to otb format:

wget
sed -i 's/FAMILY_NAME.*/FAMILY_NAME "MyFixed"/' 6x13.bdf
./fonttosfnt -b -c -g 2 -m 2 -o myfixed.otb 6x13.bdf

Install new otb font:

$ cp myfixed.otb /usr/local/share/fonts
$ dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config
$ dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig
$ fc-list | grep otb
/usr/local/share/fonts/myfixed.otb: MyFixed:style=SemiCondensed

Start app, choose font, search for "myfixed".

Menawhile Ubuntu has dropped support for bitmap terminus fonts included in the disto, I have used otb bitmap fonts from ArcLinux. The original receipe from here:

Here is its adaptation for Ubuntu 20.04:

1. Get the otb fonts package from (Download From Mirror link)
2. Convert the package to .deb with alien:

 zstd -d terminus-font-otb-4.48-3-any.pkg.tar.zst fakeroot alien terminus-font-otb-4.48-3-any.pkg.tar

3. Remove /etc/fonts/conf.d/70-no-bitmaps.conf
4. Install the resulting deb:

 sudo dpkg -i terminus-font-otb_4.48-2_all.deb

4. Logout-login (or restart X otherwise)

Viola! Beautiful terminus fonts available again!

The newer 4.49 version of Terminus fonts includes OTB font installer. This works with the new libpango that dropped the older bitmap font support. Make sure you remove the distro-installed packages of Terminus and then do the following:

tar xzf terminus-font-4.49.1.tar.gz
cd terminus-font-4.49.1
make otb
sudo make install-otb
sudo cp 75-yes-terminus.conf /etc/fonts/conf.d/
sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig

The font should be available immediately and terminal restart is not necessary. Verified with 8x16 font (size=11) in mate-terminal, works as in good old 18.04. I am actually very satisfied, because the TTF replacement of Terminus was pretty bad.

According to this there is no longer support for bitmap fonts in the old format. I tried to follow the method on that page but it did not work for me.

In the end I managed to convert and use the font I wanted by doing the following steps:

1. Opened it in fontforge (/usr/share/fonts/X11/misc/6x13-ISO8859-1.pcf.gz)
2. Editing the font info (Element -> Font Info), changing the name and family so it does not clash with the bitmap font.
3. Saving it in otb-format (File->Generate Fonts...) to ~/.fonts.
4. Then adding a new file in /etc/fonts/font.d with my new font family name.