XmBDFEditor

Role: Motif application. XmBDFEditor (xmbdfed) creates and edits bitmap fonts in BDF format. Originally written largely by Mark Leisher, it is now maintained in a Codeberg fork by David Jones (drj). It is useful for the small, precisely drawn characters found in terminals, classic X desktops and console fonts.

Working with bitmap fonts

The font grid shows characters alongside their encoding values. Open a glyph to edit its pixels and metrics; several fonts and glyph editors can remain open at once, with copy and paste between them. Font properties, comments and XLFD names can also be edited.

The glyph editor makes the relationship between a character's bitmap and its spacing visible. This is a useful companion to the X resources guide: choosing a font for an application and designing the characters in that font are different parts of the same interface.

Import options include console fonts, Windows FON/FNT and TeX PK/GF fonts; FreeType support adds TrueType import. It can also obtain fonts from an X server and export PSF and HEX files. These conversions support a bitmap-editing workflow rather than an outline-font editor.

Build and try it

With a C compiler, X11 and Motif development files, imake/xmkmf, and the FreeType development files installed, build from the source directory:

xmkmf
make
./xmbdfed example.bdf

Replace example.bdf with a font file, or omit it to start a new font. The upstream README documents optional import features and build-path overrides for a separate Motif installation.

Maintenance and documentation

The fork began in 2026. Its change history includes modern-compiler fixes, repairs to grayscale editing on TrueColor displays, and corrections to glyph editor sizing on systems with different int and long sizes.

• Project and build instructions: source and README.
• Change history: maintenance work and fixes.
• Manual page: command-line options; the application's Help menu describes its editing tools.

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