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## 7. Related info

## 7.1 How to use a font server

A font server is a net service that provides a set of X11 fonts with a simple protocol. It can be queried which fonts it provides and will supply the font bitmap data on request.

You might want to use a font server to provide the X server with a modified cursor font, instead of telling it where to find the font on the file system.

This method is especially handy if you use several machines that don't share a common file system or if you use X terminals that support the font server protocol.

A font server program and associated tools comes with the X11R5+ distribution (AFAIK).

### Setting up a font server

Read the manual pages fs(1), fslsfonts(1) (or xfs(1), xfslsfonts(1) under X11R6) and try it—it isn't hard. Say, you are running the server on host `some.host.edu` on port 7100. You can test the setup with the command

`fslsfonts -server some.host.edu:7100`

To actually use the server issue the command

`xset +fp tcp/some.host.edu:7100`

which should return without an error message.

## 7.2 How to get the bdf source for some font

If you have set up a font server simply use `fstobdf` which comes with the font server.

Alternatively you may try `getbdf` which can dump any installed X11 font to a bdf file.

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