fonts

Use xfontsel to pick a font for menus. Each asterisk is like a drop down menu, where you choose a spec. Generally you want to start with what is most important and work your way downwards in order of importance. Most people probably start with pxlsz which is size in pixels. You can leave in a lot of asterisks, so that the string matches several fonts and one of them will be used. Or you can narrow down the selection with xfontsel until you specify an exact font. Either way works. There may be better ways to do this. Xfontsel is flaky. For example, I am using the first of the example lines below successfully, but xfontsel can't see anything over 40 pxlsz on my system. Still, it is the only way I know of.

Examples:

9menu -bg "#000000" -fg "#ffffff" -font "-*-fixed-bold-r-normal-*-64-*-*-*-*-*-*-*" -file ~/9menu-A

9menu -geometry "100x100-0+50" -bg "#000000" -fg "#ffffff" -font "-adobe-helvetica-bold-r-normal--34-240-100-100-p-182-iso8859-*" -file ~/9menu-A

If you don't like any of your choices, you can install more, but picking fonts that these older x programs can use and getting them recognized is tricky.