------------------------------------------------------------
             Technology, (sdf.org), 10/08/2018
------------------------------------------------------------
I've got a Pi3 with a crumby little 3.5" TTF attached to it. 
The bad thing about this little TTF (and the good thing) is 
that it's a composite device (a backup-cam screen for auto 
use) and you can't really get a pixel-for-pixel 
representation on the screen. There's probably a technical 
term for the problem I'm describing, but I don't know it.

One challenge with such a small screen is getting a useful 
amount of characters in the width of the console. With the 
default console font, you can't do much- I am getting a 40 
column width.) Switch to the font named Latin15-Terminus12x6 
and you can start to do more, but it's still lacking (I get 
a 53 column width this way.)

Enter the old "tom thumb" font, which you may recall from 
some old Palm Pilot software[1]. It's in BDF format, which 
makes it relatively easy to convert to PSF for use as a 
console font (or, can you just use the BDF? I don't know.)
Here's the command line I used:

bdf2psf --fb tom-thumb.bdf \
/usr/share/bdf2psf/standard.equivalents \
/usr/share/bdf2psf/ascii.set+/usr/share/bdf2psf/useful.set \
256 Fixed4x6.psf

With this font, I get a width of exactly 80 columns and 40 
rows. It's like someone knew I'd be doing this one day... 

Of course, this font is a sort of last-possible-choice 
option, with an incomplete character set, and extremely poor 
readability on the type of display I'm using. But hey, it's 
one way to get 80 columns- should I need them- out of this 
technology.

For fun, I also dropped to a console from X and loaded the 
font up on my laptop. stty -a reveals that I'm getting 133 
rows and 320 columns. On my laptop screen, it's a lot more 
readable, but of course very, very tiny.

[1] https://robey.lag.net/2010/01/23/tiny-monospace-font.html