Dear Maintainer,

After installing "fonts-spleen", I ran "dpkg-reconfigure console-setup"
with the intention of switching my current font to "Spleen". However,
"Spleen" does not show up in this list.

I've had a quick look through the console-setup package and it's not
immediately obvious (to me) what needs to be done to make a new font
visible to console-setup.

Hi Paul

Well mostly the fonts- packages install vector fonts of formats ttf or
otf.

The setfont command and your configure thing uses fonts from the package
console-setup-linux,
mostly compressed pcf font format (bitmap).

Try dpkg -L console-setup-linux to see some fonts.

Your best bet to cread pcf fonts are packages like: bitsnpicas and
psftools (not packaged officially),
but grab a copy from:

http://bananas.debian.net/debian/psftools/

Best,
Alex

But this is exactly the point I'm trying to make. Spleen *is* a console
font (the package description says "monospace font for consoles and
terminals", and the file list  -
https://packages.debian.org/sid/all/fonts-spleen/filelist - shows
compressed psfu files, compressed pcf files alongside the otf files).

Maybe this bug needs to be reassigned to console-setup-linux if the only
way for developers to distribute console fonts is to extend the
console-setup-linux package, but it feels like it would be a more
flexible system if one could install extra packages of fonts and see
them appear in the choice.

As an analogy, notice that people can install, say "fonts-dejavu" and
the DejaVu fonts appear in tools such as fc-list. You don't find all the
possible fonts getting packaged in "fontconfig". In a similar way, as an
end user, I would expect to be able to install fonts-spleen, or
fonts-ubuntu-console, and then be able to pick them by reconfiguring the
console.

Hi Paul

I kind of agree, and I also always wanted an easy way of having fonts.
But bitmap fonts for framebuffer
is a bit more complicated than just a font. setfont comes together with
keyboards of all kinds (loadkyes).

And for high resolution displays, I really want a setfont -d for most
fonts (to be able to use the screen
without magnifier).

So there's /etc/default/console-setup (which can define a font, and that
you could just simply overwrite)
Installing the psf.gz (or any setfont compatible font) into
/usr/share/consolefonts doesn't make it
appear in the tui magically, there's some code processing:
/var/lib/dpkg/info/console-setup-linux.list

Here's some more console fonts:
https://github.com/alexmyczko/ree/tree/master/fnt

And I'd really like to have these, additionally to spleen:
fonts-agave, fonts-topaz-unicode (easy as src is bdf, using bdf2psf),
fonts-ocr-b, fonts-atarist (also bdf src), fonts-kode-mono,
fonts-league-mono, fonts-tt2020, fonts-ferrite-core?

Anton: maybe you have a better idea?

Best,
Alex