[CentOS] Set font and size in xterm

Fri Jan 7 19:33:46 UTC 2011
James B. Byrne <byrnejb at harte-lyne.ca>

I have a situation where gnome console does not handle vt102 escape
sequences properly and therefor need to employ xterm instead.  When
I run xterm from a gnome terminal window I am presented with an
extremely small terminal window employing an almost unreadably small
font.

I have attempted to set the font size using xrdb and a custom
.Xresources file.  I can change the colour scheme.  I can create a
scrollbar.  I can move the scrollbar to either the right or left
window margin.  What I cannot do is to change the font size.

When I do xfontsel I get this error: Warning: Missing charsets in
String to FontSet conversion and I see only four fonts listed in the
application window, all of them small and none with a point size of
greater than 12.0.!

If I do fc-cache -f -v I see 14+ font directories containing more
than 100 fonts

# fc-cache -f -v
/usr/share/fonts: caching, 0 fonts, 7 dirs
/usr/share/fonts/bitmap-fonts: caching, 31 fonts, 0 dirs
/usr/share/fonts/bitstream-vera: caching, 10 fonts, 0 dirs
.  .  .
fc-cache: succeeded

 but I also see lots of this:

/var/cache/fontconfig: invalid cache file:
f93b699072f38b46be29013fc93f1bbe-x86.cache-2
/var/cache/fontconfig: invalid cache file:
7ddba6133ef499da58de5e8c586d3b75-x86.cache-2

I really need some help sorting this out. If someone could explain
to me what I am missing I would be most grateful.

-- 
***          E-Mail is NOT a SECURE channel          ***
James B. Byrne                mailto:ByrneJB at Harte-Lyne.ca
Harte & Lyne Limited          http://www.harte-lyne.ca
9 Brockley Drive              vox: +1 905 561 1241
Hamilton, Ontario             fax: +1 905 561 0757
Canada  L8E 3C3