Linux – What tool can preview console font

It would depend upon the font formats that FreeBSD accepts in usr/share/syscons/fonts.

You can use FontForge to convert a TTF font into other formats. According to this blog post, FreeBSD accepts the Slackware .fnt.gz format (the .gz just indicates it is zipped).

The Linux console uses .psf.gz fonts. You might try one of those to see if it works, if so you could use PSF Tools to do the final conversion to that format.

If all that goes to plan, you can tell the console to use it with the vidcontrol command and then, if you wish to make it permanent, add it to your rc.conf. The blog post linked to above has the details.

You need to add the font in the printer renderer as well. The correct folder for printer renderer font libraries is a tough bird to find, but looking through all of CUPS/Ghostscript/lpr configuration you'll find the place. The fonts might need reindexing and there are scripts for that in both CUPS and GS.

Why Evince printed it out nicely is that with slight coercion you basically told it to prerender all stuff as vectors.

This is a bit unnecessarily complex mostly because these modular parts were born separately and the converging that happens at system level has happened only recently.

Apple uses CUPS internally and has solved the font installing issue somehow. I've not checked into the details but basically it either uses a central systemwide font library or copies the fonts to both GUI and CUPS font paths. I'm guessing they don't copy but have changed the softwares to support a common font path.