Fonts and FreeBSD: A Tutorial
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# 3 What font formats can I use?

Which font file format is useful depends on the application being used. FreeBSD by itself uses no fonts. Application programs and/or drivers may make use of the font files. Here is a small cross reference of application/driver to the font type suffixes:

Driver
  syscons

    `.fnt`

Application
  Ghostscript

    `.pfa`, `.pfb`, `.ttf`

  X11

    `.pfa`, `.pfb`

  Groff

    `.pfa`, `.afm`

  Povray

    `.ttf`

The `.fnt` suffix is used quite frequently. I suspect that whenever someone wanted to create a specialized font file for their application, more often than not they chose this suffix. Therefore, it is likely that files with this suffix are not all the same format; specifically, the `.fnt` files used by syscons under FreeBSD may not be the same format as a `.fnt` file one encounters in the MS-DOS®/Windows® environment. I have not made any attempt at using other `.fnt` files other than those provided with FreeBSD.

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