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The RAW file-format
(C) 1997 Yann Dirson <dirson@debian.org>
This file documents the RAW font-file-format, as understood by the Linux
console utilities ('kbd').
This file has revision number 1.0, and is dated 1997/09/02.
0. Changes
1998/08/20: updated author's e-mail.
1. Summary
A RAW file only contains one 8-pixels-wide 256-characters font, ie. each
scanline in a character occupies 1 byte.
It may contain characters of any height between 0 and 255, though character
heights lower than 8 or greater than 32 are not attested to exist or even be
useful [more info needed on this]; the file's size is used to determine the
font's height when reading it.
WARNING: no program can reliably ensure a file it reads is in this format;
it can only recognize when the file's size makes it obvious it is not. Thus
some files can be wrongly assumed to be raw font-files. For this reason, you
are strongly encouraged to use other formats, like PSF, which can be
identified by magic-number.
2. History
Unknown. This file-format probably cannot evolve.
3. Known programs understanding this file-format.
The following program in the Linux console utilities can read and/or write
RAW files:
setfont (R/W)
4. Technical data
The file format is described here in sort-of EBNF notation. Upper-case
WORDS represent terminal symbols, ie. C types; lower-case words represent
non-terminal symbols, ie. symbols defined in terms of other symbols.
[sym] is an optional symbol
{sym} is a symbol that can be repeated 0 or more times
{sym}*N is a symbol that must be repeated N times
Comments are introduced with a # sign.
# The data (U_SHORT's) are stored in LITTLE_ENDIAN byte order.
raw_file = raw_fontdata
raw_fontdata = {char_data}*256
char_data = {BYTE}*<fontheight>
# This makes the file have a size of 256*<fontheight> bytes; thus only files
# whose size has 0 as less significant byte can be interpreted as a raw font.
# One might even want to extend these lower 8 bits to 10 (resp. 11) to ensure
# that no file is wrongly assumed to be a (quite rare!) less-than-4 (resp. 8)
# scanlines font.