FRESH
Hacker News
Hacker News Hacker NewsSee also: The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack from VileR at <https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/>.
I came across this website when I was looking for IBM PC OEM fonts for a little HTML + Canvas-based invaders-like game I was developing a few years ago. It is impressive how much effort VileR has poured into recovering each OEM font and their countless variants, from a wide range of ROMs. The site not only archives them all with incredible attention to detail, but also offers live previews, aspect ratio correction and other thoughtful features that make exploring it a joy. I've spent numerous hours there comparing different OEM fonts and hunting down the best ones to use in my own work!
It took several seconds to load for me, so here's the first paragraph. It's a good first paragraph, though!
I'll definitely give this a try in my Linux TTY. Thanks for sharing!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixel
we are full circle, 40 year later.
Each UTF8 character (1 to 3 bytes) corresponds to 1 byte of input data. The average increase in data size is about 70%, but you gain binary independence in any medium that understands utf8 (email, the terminal, unit tests, etc.)
I'd like to figure out how that wrong belief could have formed.
When was "years ago"? Unscii 1 is from 2014. That's more than 15 years after the heyday of Mona Font and its predecessors.
I postulate viznut was just not aware of the huge scene due to his parochialism.
I ended up writing a rust parser for the .hex file format for use in my kernel[1]. So I can now display the fantasy kernel on bare-metal :)
[1]: https://github.com/LevitatingBusinessMan/runix/blob/limine/s...
CNXT = Constantine's Nine x Twenty
A great deficiency of Unifont mentioned several times in the other thread was its lack of combining-character support, and the absence of alternative glyphs for the code points in scripts like Arabic (well, and Engsvanyáli) whose form is affected by joiner or non-joiner context. Does anyone know if Unscii does better at this?
From opening it in Fontforge, Unscii seems to have pretty broad coverage, including things like Bengali, Ethiopic, and even runic, plus pretty full CJK(V) coverage. It seems to have some of the CSUR https://www.evertype.com/standards/csur/ assignments, such as the Tengwar of Feanor in the range U+E000 to U+E07F, but has conflicting assignments for some other ranges, like the Cirth range U+E080 to U+E0FF (present in Unifont but arguably duplicative with the runic block), which is assigned to Teletext/Videotex block mosaics. I note that my system has different conflicting assignments for this range, with Tux at U+E000 followed by a bunch of dingbats, while the Cirth range is a bunch of math symbols.
Given that astral-plane support is virtually universal in Unicode implementations these days (thanks largely to emoji) it might be better for future such efforts to use SPUA and SPUB to reduce the frequency of such codepoint clashes. SPUA and SPUB are each the size of the entire BMP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Use_Areas
For day-to-day use of semigraphic characters, I ran into the problem two hours ago in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46277275 that the "BOX DRAWING" vertical lines don't connect, consequently failing to draw proper boxes. I had the same problem in Dercuano, where I fixed it by reducing the line-height for <pre> elements. The reason seems to be that Firefox defaults line-height to "normal", which is apparently equivalent to "1.41em", which doesn't sound very normal to me (isn't an "em" defined as the normal line height?), and, although the line-drawing characters in my font (which seems to be Noto Sans Mono) are taller than 1em, they still don't reliably join up if the line-height is taller than 1.21em.
Chromium does the same thing, except its abnormal definition of "normal" is evidently more like 1.35em.
It's probably too late to make a change to the standard HN stylesheet so major as
pre { line-height: 1.2em }
If not, though, perhaps the fact that the line-height is already different between Chromium and Firefox represents a certain amount of possible flexibility...
Obviously the line-height would be a much more serious problem for the kinds of diagonal semigraphic characters that viznut is largely focusing on here; those would strictly require a line-height of exactly 1em, which I think would substantially impair the readability of code samples.