The primary font file format for the Linux Console Tools, as of version 0.2.x, is
the PSF format, which is also used by kbd. 0.3.x will introduce the
XPSF format, which will be able to replace all existing file formats.
Raw fonts can be converted into PSF files with the font2psf(1)
(written by Martin Lohner, SuSE GmbH).
Versions 0.2.x do not have support for the CP format again - this will
come back in the 0.3.x development branch.
The psfaddtable(1), psfgettable(1), and
psfstriptable(1) tools are provided by the Linux Console Tools for manipulation
of the SFM embedded in PSF files. These are the only
font-manipulation tools provided by the Linux Console Tools as of version 0.2.x.
The font2psf(1) tool is available in the contrib directory
to convert old raw fonts into PSF fonts.
There are plans for a more generic font-conversion tool based on
libcfont. It will be mostly trivial to write once work on libcfont
will be advanced enough.
The only way provided by the Linux Console Tools to display a font's contents is to load it, and then to display it using showfont(1).
Font editors
I do not curently know of a good font-editor suitable for editing
console fonts. I tried fonter, but this one has a bad design
flaw: you can only properly edit cp437 fonts (or maybe ASCII-based
fonts if you like unreadable screens) because it works on the console
and loads the font you are editing. I was told about cse which I
did not tried yet. Marcin Kowalczyk is working on the
fonty tool
(which I did not check yet either), which will help font designers,
but is not AFAIK a real editor. Robert de Bath works on
his own tools
which handle a variety of file formats and table formats.