Large Fonts

["William D. Gooch" <ai.gooch@MCC.COM>]

    I am in need of a font family with large point sizes for displaying
    output on a color console 3650.

    We are using a large screen video projector to display the contents of
    the color console for demonstration purposes.  The standard TV fonts
    that are mapped to the character style families Swiss, Dutch, Fix, etc.
    appear too small for comfortable viewing when projected on a large
    screen (not to mention that they are also pretty small for everyday
    use on the color console itself!).

There are various other tv fonts available in the normally distributed
Symbolics source file set (found in the subdirectories of sys:fonts;)
which are not directly accessible through the predefined families. 
These may be loaded using the function FED:FIND-AND-LOAD-FONT, e.g.:

(fed::find-and-load-font 'fonts:43vxms)

You can also get at LGP fonts (which are much bigger on screen because
of the higher resolution of LGPs) via the function FED:FIND-AND-LOAD-BFD,
e.g.:

(fed:find-and-load-bfd 'fonts:schoolbook
		       '("sys:fonts;lgp2;centuryschoolbook105.bfd")) 

Note that this will get an error because the symbol fonts:schoolbook is
not the same symbol defined by the file, but you can just <resume> from
this error to go ahead and use the symbol you specified anyway.

You can then create character styles for such fonts by doing something
like the following:

(setf *really-big-times-roman-style*
      (si:parse-character-style '(:device-font fonts:schoolbook :normal))) 

and then you can use the new styles via (with-character-style ...) or ~v
in FORMAT control strings, or whatever.

Have fun!