I'm currently striving to enliven my desktop using conky, which works surprisingly well so far. However, to spruce up the presentation, I would like to employ somewhat unusual effects, such as an 'inset font' (e.g. 1 , 2, 3), an 'intarsia/quilted font' or a metalic appearing font. I have managed to get some decent looking png's exported from GIMP with stock phrases (e.g. "Sunday", "April",...) and used those to display my "text".

Since this was not quite what I was hoping for, I decided to try and 'make' a bitmap font. Apparently, it did not help that I only have the vaguest notion of what a bitmap font actually is ... you know, colored little glyphs that would get printed on screen when I when I called my 'out' function like this out(font="the_Bitmap_Font_Name","The quick brown fox ...").

I got so far as to use Shoebox to turn a GIMP prepared png with the effect I'm looking for into what I believe to be a bitmap font with definition file ... except I don't know if this really is a usable font, or how to install it.

Have I got all this wrong? Did I really end up with a usable font, or just so much junk ... or do I need to 'package' it differently?

ANY help would be greatly appreciated.