Tweaking Bitmapped Font Sizes in Linux/XFree86

Goal:

A ridiculous number of web pages set font size=2 or font size=-1 because of Internet Explorer's idiotic size overlarge size settings. Mozilla has a nifty "minimum font size" setting, but it has no way of specifying separate settings for variable-width and fixed-width fonts. I do a lot of work in fixed width (on bugzilla pages, for example) and I want to use my font of choice (schumacher clean in size 13, thank you very much) without dooming myself to reading everything in teeny tiny size-13 helvetica. If I could just make XFree86 show me size 13 clean when mozilla asks for size 14, I could set my minimum font size to 14 across the board and everything would be readable. This page describes how to do that.

Redhat:

edit /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/fonts.dir
Search for schumacher
Find each schumacher line with a "14" in it: they'll look like this,

clR7x14.pcf.gz -schumacher-clean-medium-r-normal--14-140-75-75-c-70-iso646.1991-irv

Change the filename (the first word in the line, something like clR7x14.pcf.gz, to be the size 13 equivalent, e.g. clR6x13.pcf.gz. Note that the 14 may not be the only thing that has to change. Look nearby and find a line with the size 13 filename, and use that.

Repeat for all instances in the file. In a fairly vanilla Redhat 7.3 installation there were three I had to change.

Now quit X, run service xfs stop followed by service xfs start (I've been warned that service xfs restart does not always work -- YMMV), then go back into X.

Debian:

To be added soon; should be similar except for the xfs restart.

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