loadfont

loadfont [OPTIONS] FONTFILE

FONTFILE
    Specifies the path to the PC screen font (.psf) file to be loaded.

-V, --version
    Displays version information for the loadfont utility.

-h, --help
    Prints a brief help message and usage information.

loadfont is a utility used to load a PC screen font (typically in PSF format) into the kernel's console font memory.
This command directly affects the appearance of text on the Linux text console (TTYs), allowing users to customize font styles, sizes, and character sets. While historically important for console personalization, it is often a wrapper or symbolic link to the more versatile setfont(8) command on modern Linux distributions. Its primary purpose is to provide an alternative or legacy method for console font management, particularly when dealing with older font formats or specific system setups.

Using loadfont typically requires root privileges to modify kernel console settings. It only affects the text-mode virtual consoles (TTYs) and has no impact on graphical desktop environments.
On many contemporary systems, loadfont is a symbolic link or a less commonly used alias for setfont(8), which offers broader functionality and is the preferred command for console font manipulation.
The command expects font files in the PC Screen Font (PSF) format.

The loadfont command is designed to load fonts specifically formatted as PC Screen Font (PSF) files. PSF is a simple bitmap font format commonly used on Linux text consoles. These files contain character bitmaps and metadata, allowing for efficient rendering of text in console environments.

The loadfont command has been a part of Linux console utilities, often found within the kbd or console-tools packages.
It emerged as a dedicated tool for loading PC screen fonts directly into the console, a crucial function for customizing the text-mode interface in early Linux environments.
Over time, its functionality has largely been absorbed or superseded by the more comprehensive setfont(8) command, which provides extended control over console fonts and character mappings. Consequently, on many modern distributions, loadfont exists primarily as a compatibility symlink to setfont.

setfont(8), kbd(7), console-tools(7), showfont(8)