Re: the Courier font family and nroff history

[Tadziu Hoffmann]

> (I use a bitmap font because it's substantially more readable
> for long periods of time than any TrueType font I've found at
> equivalent sizes, but using a bitmap font disables some of
> xterm's font family support.)

The xterm source can be hacked to provide italics using the
classic bitmap fonts (see attached image).
[My mod is most certainly incomplete and/or partially wrong
since I did not embrace the full complexity of xterm's
configuration options, but it works for my limited use case.]

As a side note, I find that for reading documentation, color
is more helpful than italics alone.  You can achieve this
either using the xterm resources colorBDMode & colorBD and
colorULMode & colorUL (or possibly colorITMode & colorIT)
or, if you only need this within "less", by using
"traditional" backspace highlighting with grotty:

  export GROFF_NO_SGR=yes

and setting

  export LESS_TERMCAP_md=$'\E[1m\E[34m'
  export LESS_TERMCAP_us=$'\E[3m\E[31m'
  export LESS_TERMCAP_ue=$'\E[23m\E[39m'

to make "less" generate the terminal control sequences
instead of grotty.

xterm.png
Description: PNG image