[HN Gopher] The Oldschool PC Font Pack v2.0
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The Oldschool PC Font Pack v2.0
Author : sep
Score : 222 points
Date : 2020-07-17 12:13 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (int10h.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (int10h.org)
| flobosg wrote:
| I am using an old laptop as a console-only typewriter. This might
| come in handy for inspiration, thank you!
| urb wrote:
| Amir rulezz!
| bloopernova wrote:
| This led me on a short Google trip to find the Sun Openboot font:
|
| Finding this:
| https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/307356/what-is-the-...
|
| And this is the TTF of that font:
| https://github.com/Zygo/xscreensaver/blob/master/OSX/gallant...
| cerberusss wrote:
| Around 2000, I worked at Lucent, which was a Sun shop. But I
| can't remember this font. Was it only used on the console, i.e.
| in text mode?
| bloopernova wrote:
| When you hit stop-a to emergency-halt the system, you'd see
| this console.
| mceachen wrote:
| If you booted single-user or didn't have a graphical login
| manager, you'd see this on the console on SunOS 4 and earlier
| (80s and 90s, pre-Solaris). I think by the time Solaris (or
| even open look) rolled around, it had a graphical user login.
| brirec wrote:
| Solaris 2.6 and 7 didn't have a graphical boot splash, so
| you'd see this while watching a SPARC box boot up.
| ggerules wrote:
| Thank you for posting this! It brings back a lot of memories.
| bitwize wrote:
| Oh my God, they have the Tandy 2000 font.
| magoon wrote:
| A trip down memory lane, bringing back so much just looking at
| the fonts. It's amazing how much I associate each company's
| historical fonts with their brand.
| dilandau wrote:
| For linux users, you can open the .FON files with fontforge, then
| go to file menu -> generate to create a .bdf file (I prefer to
| use bitmap over ttf to avoid any artifacts).
| viler wrote:
| At the right sizes the included 'Mx' fonts should avoid those
| artifacts - they're ttf but contain embedded bitmaps, which
| seem to be better supported in Linux than in Windows
| (supported, but silly hacks required) or macOS (seemingly not
| supported at all). :)
|
| I do want to include .bdf fonts in future versions, especially
| if the conversion is as simple as that. But if I do it I want
| to be sure I do it correctly, and I'm still not 100% familiar
| with the format.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Any chance you can publish some details on what your workflow
| looks like to generate these fonts?
|
| I'd be interested in generating some bitmap conversions of
| some classic non-VGA fonts, like Apple's bitmap fonts (some
| of which were never converted to TrueType!) and some X11
| standards like fixed13.
| klodolph wrote:
| If you are on Linux, you will probably want to convert to OTB
| instead. Pango has dropped support for BDF and it's just a
| matter of time before your distro gets hit with the full effect
| (if you are on a "stable" channel then you probably haven't
| gotten hit yet). If you use old-school X programs without Pango
| you may not notice, but nearly everything on Linux that doesn't
| look like XTerm uses Pango.
|
| See: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BitmapFontConversion
|
| As a side effect, the fonts will probably work better as OTB
| anyway. At least, that's my experience.
| bitwize wrote:
| Makes sense. Bdf is an X11 format, and X is deprecated
| technology. X font rendering is certainly deprecated.
| dilandau wrote:
| Wayland fans: so desperate for traction that they'll snap
| up any chance to spread false information. Or maybe this
| commenter doesn't know the difference between gnome/pango
| and xorg/xft?
|
| Xorg isn't going anywhere for a very long time.
| api wrote:
| From day one Wayland struck me as a completely
| unnecessary effort that could instead have been spent
| making Xorg better and fixing its problems. If aspects of
| Xorg are ugly, create new extensions and deprecate the
| old ones and set a sunset after which those old
| extensions will be removed. That would be a much easier
| sell than a 100% new graphics server.
|
| This sort of "lets rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite, ad
| infinitum" stuff is a major problem with the open source
| community. It leads to an enormous amount of wasted
| effort in an area where effort is always needed to
| address real problems around usability and hardware
| compatibility.
| klodolph wrote:
| X11 is too centralized. Adding more extensions
| exacerbates the problem--most of those extensions should
| have been in libraries in the first place, and with
| Wayland, they can finally be taken out of the server and
| into individual apps. That, and X11 has too many built-in
| assumptions which haven't been reasonable for _most
| users_ for 20 years (but it sure is nice to run X over
| SSH on a low-bandwidth link!)
|
| The usability improvements on the Linux desktop happened
| in spite of X11. The conversation is about font rendering
| --and why should font rendering be a part of your
| windowing system? For most apps, it's not--it's in Pango,
| and Pango dropped support for X fonts. All of these
| changes which _already happened_ have been eroding
| whatever advantages X11 offered in the first place.
|
| So it's time to decentralize all the random functionality
| in X11, and just move it into client-side libraries.
| api wrote:
| I don't get it. I don't understand why things can't be
| deprecated and why this requires a 100% new clean slate
| rewrite that actually _loses_ functionality (the ability
| to run remote).
|
| The other problem is priorities. There are a million
| other much higher priority things: better hardware
| support, better support for laptop power management,
| endless usability improvements to desktop apps, etc.
| bitwize wrote:
| Of course I know the difference. Pango is part of the
| "new world" in which all text rendering is done client-
| side. BDF is the old X11 bitmap format, used for X11's
| server-side text rendering. It makes sense for Pango to
| move away from supporting it, as hardly anyone uses BDF
| anymore except for backward compatibility with legacy X
| applications, and the world is moving away from X.
|
| Matter of fact, rendering _everything_ is moving to
| client side, hence why X is increasingly unnecessary, and
| why Wayland is designed the way it is.
|
| Oh, and among "Wayland fans" you can count just about
| everyone who knows anything about the Linux graphics
| stack, except maybe for Keith Packard. So yes, getting
| traction is important, because no one wants to keep
| maintaining the broken X architecture. Xorg is largely
| maintained by Red Hat who have put it in "hard
| maintenance" mode with virtually no new development.
| dilandau wrote:
| Ah yes, the "new world" that the developers like and that
| ultimately complicates things for end-users, and
| obsoletes 30+ years of software in the process.
|
| I prefer stability.
| bitwize wrote:
| You want to talk complicating things for end users? Does
| "XF86Config" mean anything to you? X only got halfway
| decent when the KMS driver came out, migrating much of
| the video hardware functionality OUT of X and into the
| kernel. The X server is thus now largely a state tracker
| for an obsolete protocol.
|
| Meanwhile, Wayland has pretty much the same graphics
| server architecture that Windows and macOS had _decades
| ago_. It finally brings the Linux desktop architecture in
| line with the state of the art. There may be a rough
| transition period, but the faster the Linux community
| pulls together and rips the X band-aid off, the shorter
| that period will be.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| > X is deprecated technology
|
| That is false, X and Xorg are being under continuous
| development. Some Wayland fanboys use this as weaselwords
| to convince less informed people to migrate to it in an
| attempt to increase its user share, but Xorg still has
| dedicated developers working on it and it wont go anywhere
| for the foreseeable future.
| klodolph wrote:
| > Some Wayland fanboys use this as weaselwords to
| convince less informed people...
|
| This is some first-class flamebait in really poor taste.
|
| Anyway--from what I understand, Xorg is is nearing the
| end of its life as an actively developed project. You can
| see that the release cadence is much slower than it was a
| couple years ago, it's gone from something like a six-
| month cadence to a two-year cadence.
|
| The lion's share of the development is sponsored by orgs
| like Red Had and they've publicly warned people that this
| may not continue into the future.
|
| See: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=
| X.Org-Ma...
|
| The comments about font rendering technology are
| relevant. You simply _can't_ use X font rendering to
| achieve what is, in 2020, considered to be the bare
| minimum for text presentation. Up until recently, this
| was papered over by libraries that could abstract over
| the differences between old-style X fonts and modern TTF
| fonts (TTF is almost as old as X!) For various reasons,
| the backwards compatibility was ditched a few months ago.
| The abstraction had just grown too unwieldy and had too
| many special cases.
| dilandau wrote:
| >not constantly changing equals it's end-of-life
|
| No, it just means that its stable. I understand that it's
| probably habit to justify constant changes to your
| software projects, but in my experience, it's a good
| thing to be conservative, and a very good thing to
| maintain compatibility over a very long span of time.
|
| EDIT: I swear, what is it with people opportunistically
| virtue-signalling on HN comments? Masks? Really?
| klodolph wrote:
| Compatibility comes at a cost--by supporting old users,
| sometimes you fail to support new users. This is not
| hypothetical, this is at the core of the problem with BDF
| fonts.
| bitwize wrote:
| Ackshually, what happened was the X11 maintainers jumped
| ship to Wayland.
|
| Once again, just about everyone who knows thing one about
| graphics on Linux is on board with the Wayland
| transition. Just like everyone who knows thing one about
| virology or epidemiology is on board with social
| distancing and wearing a mask.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't do flamebait or name-calling here. It
| degrades discussion and evokes worse from others.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| [deleted]
| dang wrote:
| 2020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22001964
|
| 2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16098262
|
| 2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14695319
|
| 2016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11021430
|
| It's a fine thing to submit but the cutoff for dupes is about a
| year: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
|
| Edit: scratch that, we'll make an exception since it's the first
| new release in several years. See discussion in subthread below.
| sep wrote:
| v2.0 of this was released just a few days ago, after several
| years without a major version. Hence the submission.
|
| Btw, thanks for doing the hard and important work of moderating
| hn! [Edit: I realize now that the last part may come off as
| sarcastic, so I want to emphasize it is sincere. While here I
| disagree with the action, I'm generally very thankful for the
| moderators' work.]
| dang wrote:
| Ah, ok, I missed that. And now I understand why you submitted
| https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/readme/#history
| originally. But are the differences with v2 enough to support
| a substantively different _discussion_? I would say probably
| not? This comes up whenever new versions of projects are
| released - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23071428
| for a longer explanation.
|
| I'd be happy to make an exception if there's a case for the
| diff with v2.
| sep wrote:
| The original submission-title was more descriptive
| (something like: "The Oldschool PC Font Pack v2.0 Released:
| 133 fonts added, new online index"), but I assume a
| moderator edited it to the current, more concise, one.
|
| Feature-wise, the new version offers about 3 times as many
| "oldschool" fonts as the previous version, and also
| introduces the use of several techniques not typically used
| elsewhere to make the fonts more palettable for modern use
| (aspect correction, embedded bitmaps to bypass anti-
| aliasing). Also the online font index has more details
| regarding each font.
|
| I would say that a very detailed online font index and
| fonts that are now much more palettable for modern use, may
| well be grounds for new discussions.
| dang wrote:
| Alright, we'll remove the dupe penalty.
| plg wrote:
| WOW there is a strange visual illusion for me, the red fonts seem
| to be sitting 3D <behind> the rest of the page
| kmill wrote:
| Two possibilities come to mind. The red channel in each pixel
| might be at the left, causing all the pure red text to be
| slightly shifted relative to the other text.
|
| Another might be chromatic aberration if you wear glasses.
| (This causes the Windows logo to look comically maligned for
| me.) Whether it's behind or in front of the text would depend
| on the tilt of your head.
| zerocrates wrote:
| Wow I posted at basically the same time, and _also_ mentioned
| the Microsoft logo. It 's just a perfect test case to see
| this kind of thing happening, I guess.
| zerocrates wrote:
| Do you wear glasses? You could be seeing the effects of
| chromatic abberation.
|
| I have fairly thick and high-refractive-index glasses and can
| regularly experience this phenomenon where different-colored
| text shifts in different directions, creating a "3D" effect.
| The Microsoft logo is a great example of this: if I tilt my
| head up the red/orange and blue squares seem to move toward
| each other, and the yellow and green ones away from each other,
| and vice versa if I tilt my head down.
| viler wrote:
| My hunch is that this could be the result of subpixel
| antialiasing. It often creates a sort of fringing around the
| text, which ideally isn't very apparent... but it takes
| advantage of separate RGB components. Red text has only one
| component, so the fringing may have the effect of darkening on
| one side, and brightening on the other, which can look a little
| like 3d relief.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Surprisingly legible
| rbanffy wrote:
| It never ceases to amaze me that the IBM PC got these fonts when
| IBM big iron terminals had a much nicer, modern geometric sans
| serif font. They just needed to use the 5100 font or terminal
| fonts they were already using.
| jeppesen-io wrote:
| Likely because the IBM PC project was a very rushed job, by IBM
| standards. It was built rather quickly using as much as
| possible off the shelf hardware and software. Due to the buacr
| bureaucratic nature of the company of the time, the project was
| largely kept from the rest of the company. That's why they
| outsourced DOS
|
| When the project started, they were way way behind in the home
| PC market
| mietek wrote:
| _> a much nicer, modern geometric sans serif font_
|
| Which font was that?
| rbanffy wrote:
| The 5100, 5110, and 5120 computers had a simple sans serif
| font, with a distinctive narrow zero. The 3270, 3150, and
| 5250 terminals also shared a very nice design (which was
| copied into x3270's), with distinctive 6's, 9's and the
| dotted rounded 0 (that made it easier to distinguish from the
| squarer O). The 3270 also had the peculiarity of having the
| digits being slighly taller than the letters.
|
| I'm not sure which was the first machine that had the
| distinctive MDA look that flowed into CGA, EGA, and VGA.
| Could be something created for the PC.
|
| If all else failed, it'd be nicer if they just did like
| Commodore and copied the Atari 8-bit one with wide stems. The
| NTSC output for the CGA board more or less mandated the wide
| stems to prevent color artifacts.
| viler wrote:
| That's part of the reason I've added more fonts from more
| compatibles: some of them had much nicer ones - the Cordata and
| Wyse machines in particular more than doubled the resolution of
| the original IBM fonts, and indeed achieved something quite
| close to that 'classic terminal' look.
|
| The IBM PC was meant to support both color and monochrome
| displays though ("color" meaning "cheap TV-resolution CGA"
| :-)), and there are hints that both functions were originally
| supposed to go on the same adapter board. That plus cost
| cutting are probably why the same ROM chip contained both the
| color and monochrome fonts, so neither of them could have been
| very high-res...
| rbanffy wrote:
| I love that the Cordata PPC-400 was included. It's one of the
| most beautiful screen fonts I've ever seen.
| viler wrote:
| Yep! They seemed to be quite proud of it in the PPC-400
| User's Guide. It goes on to describe the availability of
| various character attributes (reverse video, underlining,
| blinking, intensity) as "part of Corona's continuing effort
| to provide you with the finest and most advanced products".
|
| Definitely a well-done design. If it wasn't for the
| ToshibaSat 8x14 font (also included), that'd be my code
| editor font of choice now.
| rbanffy wrote:
| If I hadn't made my own 3270 font, I'd seriously consider
| it.
| rob74 wrote:
| Yeah, I really hated the standard IBM font too... trying to
| look like a serif font and having to "fall back" to sans serif
| most of the time anyway because there just wasn't enough space
| for the serifs... why?! And the patterns drawn with the
| standard background "pattern characters" looked horrible in the
| 80x25 mode which was used most of the time, because the
| hardware inserted an extra column repeating the 8th column, so
| the font matrix was actually 9x16, but the font didn't account
| for that.
|
| Actually back in the bad old DOS days I went as far as
| realizing that it was really easy to replace the "default" font
| (at least on German/non-US machines, which installed a
| different font from a file which contained the correct
| characters for the German code page). So I wrote a small
| program to hack this code page file and insert my own sans-
| serif font. An additional realization was that 8 = 3+1+3+1 - so
| if you designed your "pattern characters" to have 2 "patterned"
| columns 3 pixels wide and 2 empty columns 1 pixel wide (so the
| repeated column would be empty too), the pattern would look
| nicer when shown in the 9x16 matrix. I wonder if I still have
| that laying around somewhere...
| Exmoor wrote:
| Unrelated to the fonts, but I _really_ love that CSS they 're
| using to emulate the ANSI interfaces of my youth. Perhaps it's
| just a product of my age, but I find it a lot more usable then a
| lot of similar website interfaces.
| sjs382 wrote:
| https://artpacks.org uses a similar interface, which was super
| fun to work on.
| [deleted]
| airstrike wrote:
| It's so incredibly easy to parse visually. I'm in heaven. The
| lime-green background for selected text adds a special touch!
|
| I wish there was a CSS framework for this type of UI language
| tass wrote:
| There is bootstra.386 which put a smile on my face:
| https://kristopolous.github.io/BOOTSTRA.386/
| signal11 wrote:
| Something like TuiCss[1]?
|
| [1] https://github.com/vinibiavatti1/TuiCss
| sep wrote:
| Link to the detailed font index: https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-
| fonts/fontlist/
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(page generated 2020-07-17 23:01 UTC)