Using wildcards

Wildcard characters can be used to shorten the string needed to specify a font. The asterisk (*) and question mark (?) serve as wildcard characters in much the same way they do for the operating system: an asterisk represents any combination or variety of characters and a question mark represents any single character.

To prevent the shell from interpreting the wildcards, either enclose the entire font name in quotes or use a backslash before each wildcard character. For example, the two following lines are valid wildcard representations of the font discussed in the previous section. In this example, the font is being specified for the scoterm client using the -fn command line option.

scoterm -fn '*courier-bold-o-*-100*' &

scoterm -fn \*courier-bold-o-\*-100\* &

You should be aware of the following when using wildcards in font specifications:

• Font specifications using wildcards should explicitly name enough parts of the font's full name to create an unambiguous reference. Wildcarded font specifications usually specify the font family, weight, slant, and point size.

• If the wildcarded font specification is ambiguous (in other words, more than one font matches the specification), the X server chooses which font to use. If fonts from more than one font directory match the wildcarded name, the server chooses a font from the directory that occurs first in the font path. In other words, fonts defined in the 75dpi directory are chosen rather than fonts in the 100dpi directory.

• It is better to match the point size field (which is measured in tenths of a point) than the pixel field. This allows your wildcarded font name to work properly with monitors of different resolutions, because the wildcarded font name matches either the 75dpi or 100dpi font set.