splitfont

splitfont

    The path to the PSF font file to be processed.

The splitfont command is a utility used to extract individual glyphs from a PSF (PC Screen Font) font file. This is useful for analyzing the font, creating custom character sets, or converting the glyphs into other formats. It reads a PSF font file and outputs each glyph as a separate PBM (Portable Bitmap) image file. The output files are named sequentially, allowing easy access to each individual glyph. The command is often used in conjunction with tools for font editing or raster image manipulation. splitfont is primarily used on Linux systems, often in embedded environments, where specific custom font needs are often paramount.
It's important to note that the PSF format itself comes in different versions, and splitfont may not support all of them perfectly. It's useful in tasks like adapting fonts for specific hardware, creating small custom GUIs or tweaking terminal emulators.
Note: It typically requires appropriate privileges to access and modify font files depending on their location within the file system.

The command creates a series of PBM files named 'glyph000.pbm', 'glyph001.pbm', and so on, each representing a single glyph from the input font. The exact number of files created depends on the number of glyphs present in the PSF font file.

psfaddtable(1), psfgettable(1), psfstriptable(1), bitmap(5)