How to get a bigger font in XTerm that supports displaying Japanese

The Problem

The largest fixed width font encoded in Unicode that comes with XFree86 is 18 points. The default fonts for XTerm include a 20 point font but it does not have any Japanese characters in it.

I would like to use the 24 point font jiskan24 in XTerm but it is not encoded with Unicode.

The Solution

Recode the jiskan24 into Unicode and make it available.

The solution has the following caveats:

The jiskan24 defines only the JISX0208.1983 characters. Do not try to use it as a general purpose font as it does not even have the ASCII characters in it.
This is not a substitute for a real Unicode font. There are many more characters in the Unicode fonts that come with XFree86 besides the basic ISO-8859-1 and Japanese sets.
The characters in the jiskan24 font tend to fill the 24x24 cells very tightly. You may find that there is not enough vertical seperation between characters in XTerm because of this.

Procedure

Get the source code for the jiskan24 font.
Run this script to convert it to Unicode:
```
./bdf-jisx-to-unicode <jiskan24.bdf >jiskan24u.bdf
```
The script requires kanjidic to be available as it uses it to get the JIS character numbers.

Compile the font and install it where you put locally installed fonts:

bdftopcf jiskan24u.bdf >jiskan24u.pcf
cp jiskan24u.pcf /usr/local/lib/X11/fonts
cd /usr/local/lib/X11/fonts
mkfontdir

Tell the X server about it if it is already running:
```
xset fp rehash
```

Now you should be able to use the font in XTerm. Use something like this as a command line:

uxterm -fn '-sony-fixed-medium-r-normal--24-230-75-75-c-120-iso8859-1' -fw -jis-fixed-medium-r-normal--24-230-75-75-c-240-iso10646-1

I have placed the above command in a one liner script called big-xterm.

This solution does not allow using the font menus in XTerm to switch fonts. It looks like there is no way to set the wide font when using the menus. The reason why the wide font is not detected automatically is that the normal and wide font names do not differ only by the average character width. One workaround would be to fake up the names of one or both of the fonts but I did not do that.