fonts with combining characters

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The XLFD distinguishes three options for the SPACING field:

P  Proportional    no restrictions on the metric
M  Monospaced      the logical width of every character is equal, but
                   "ink" is allowed to go beyond the logical width
C  CharCell        all characters are contained in boxes of equal size

ftp://sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk/packages/X11/pub/R6.4/xc/doc/hardcopy/XLFD/xlfd.PS.gz

The -misc-fixed-* fonts are all of the CharCell category, while the fixed-width fonts of Adobe and B&H fall into the Monospaced category, probably, because the renderer didn't guarantee that there is no out-of-box ink.

XLFD

The X Logical Font Descriptor (XLFD) is a text string made up of 13 parts separated by a minus sign, i.e.:

-Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal-13-120-75-75-C-70-ISO8859-1
-Adobe-Helvetica-Medium-R-Normal-12-120-75-75-P-67-ISO8859-1

FOUNDRY

text name of font creator FAMILY_NAME
name of the font. Related fonts generally have the same base names; i.e. helvetica, helvetica narrow , etc. WEIGHT_NAME
usually one of [Light|Medium|Demibold|Bold] but other types may exist SLANT
one of [R|I|O]. i and o are used similarly, AFAIK SETWIDTH_NAME
[Normal|Condensed|Narrow|Double Wide] ADD_STYLE_NAME
not a classification field, used only for additional differentiation PIXEL_SIZE
0 = scalable font; integer typicially height of bounding box POINT_SIZE
typically height of bounding box in tenths of pixels RESOLUTION_X
horizontal dots per inch RESOLUTION_Y
vertical dots per inch SPACING
[P|M|C] p = proportional, m = monospaced, c = charcell. Charcell is a special case of monospaced where no glyphs have pixels outside the character cell; i.e. there is no kerning (no negative metrics). AVERAGE_WIDTH
unweighted arithmetic mean of absolute value of width of each glyph in tenths of pixels CHARSET_REGISTRY and CHARSET_ENCODING
the chararterset used to encode the font; ISO8859-1 for Latin 1 fonts