Is there an user-level accessible font table present in Linux?

Question

Since there is this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437 For MSDOS, is there something similar for Linux systems? Is it possible to access that font data via userland program? I would actually just need an access to the actual bit patterns which define the font, and I would do the rendering myself. I'm fairly sure that something like this exists, but I haven't been able to find what exactly is it and how to access it. After all, e.g. text mode console font has to reside somewhere, and I really do hope it is "rawly" accessible somehow for a userland program.

Before I forget, I'm programming my program in C, and have access only to the "standard" linux/posix development headers. The only thing I could came up with myself is to use the fonts in /usr/share/fonts, but having to write my own implementations to extract the data from there doesn't sound really an option; I would really want to achieve this with the least amount of bytes possible, so I feel I'm left with finding a standard way of doing this.

It's not really feasible for me to store my own 8x8 ASCII-compatible font with the program either(it takes some 1024 bytes(128 chars * 8x8 bits) just to store the font, which is definitely unacceptable for the strict size limits(some < 1024 bytes for code+data) which I am working with), so being able to use the font data stored at the system itself would greatly simplify my task.

Answer 1

I had a look at consolechars sources and it looks like there is a whole library for this kind of stuff. On Ubuntu it's named libconsole and header files (like lct/font.h) are in the console-tools-dev package. There are functions to find and load fonts which seems to be exactly what you need. And consolechars source is a nice example of how to use them.