> (I use a bitmap font because it's substantially more readable > for long periods of time than any TrueType font I've found at > equivalent sizes, but using a bitmap font disables some of > xterm's font family support.)
The xterm source can be hacked to provide italics using the classic bitmap fonts (see attached image). [My mod is most certainly incomplete and/or partially wrong since I did not embrace the full complexity of xterm's configuration options, but it works for my limited use case.] As a side note, I find that for reading documentation, color is more helpful than italics alone. You can achieve this either using the xterm resources colorBDMode & colorBD and colorULMode & colorUL (or possibly colorITMode & colorIT) or, if you only need this within "less", by using "traditional" backspace highlighting with grotty: export GROFF_NO_SGR=yes and setting export LESS_TERMCAP_md=$'\E[1m\E[34m' export LESS_TERMCAP_us=$'\E[3m\E[31m' export LESS_TERMCAP_ue=$'\E[23m\E[39m' to make "less" generate the terminal control sequences instead of grotty.
