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Common Desktop Environment: Programmer's Overview

Application Fonts

At least six point sizes are available on all Common Desktop Environment platforms for each font associated with a Standard Font Name: 8, 10, 12, 14, 18, and 24. XLFD font descriptions for Common Desktop Environment fonts look like:

-dt-application-*

when used where such patterns are valid.

Two of the most common design variations in fonts used to display text are the presence or absence of serifs and the choice between proportional or regularly spaced (monospaced) characters. Combining these two design variations yields four generic font designs:

Common examples of each of these four designs (in corresponding order) are:

Each of these designs for text fonts typically come in four styles (combinations of weight and slant):

The four styles of each of the four design variations yield 16 generic font variations. These 16 generic fonts are among the most commonly used in general desktop computing. For example, Times Roman, Helvetica, and Courier, each in the four style variations, along with the Symbol font, constitute the Adobe\256 13--the minimum set of fonts built into all PostScript printers.

Your application might not require an exact font family or name, but will need to use, for example, a monospaced font, a sans serif font, or a serif font. You do not have to know the exact font names present on a particular Common Desktop Environment platform. The Common Desktop Environment standard fonts default to the vendor's selection of the best font of a particular design on the vendor's platform.

Specify the XLFD font names for the standard application fonts your application needs as font resource values in the application's app-defaults file. If you do not use these font names, you might need to supply a different app-defaults file for each application on each Common Desktop Environment platform.