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The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack

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Re: The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack

#31

Post by ddingus »

bitwize wrote: post #28
rbanffy wrote: post #26

I always wonder why IBM chose these horrible serif designs over their previous, much nicer, cleaner, fonts you can find on their 32xx terminals...

The double-width vertical strokes improve visibility.

They also help on composite displays, still a significant consideration at the time the PC was created.

PAL didn't suffer too much from this, but NTSC did. Single pixel verticals light up in a rainbow of color. This is actually how the monochrome Apple 2 did it's color graphics!

White on blue is a secondary helper here. On sharp displays, the human eye sees the white text at full detail. Humans have only a fraction of blue receptors, compared to red and green. This means screen noise gets lost in a sea of blue.

On composite displays, that same sea of blue tends to was artifacts away. SGI IRIX offered it's Xterm with a great font, white on blue and it was very easy on the eyes.

I've used that combo for terminals ever since.

Re: The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack

#32

Post by mattkevan »

david-given wrote: post #18

See also these articles, for real old-school fonts: https://damieng.com/blog/2011/02/20/typography-in-8-bits-sys... https://damieng.com/blog/2014/07/20/typography-in-bits-other... Me, I grew up on Acorn machines, so those are my classic nostalgia font. Although, on a modern LCD with square-edged pixels, they look like arse --- jaggy and overly bold. I wonder if there's a way to emulate fuzzy CRTs with Truetype...

The Acorn system font brings a rush of nostalgia and a shudder of revulsion every time I see it. Good grief was it ugly.

One of the first things I learned to do was write a script to load something else on boot - Acorn's Arial knockoff I think. That was ugly too, but better by far.

Re: The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack

#34

Post by chris_wot »

viley wrote: post #22
SwellJoe wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll worry about that when I get a cease and desist (I don't expect to get a cease and desist...the market value of these fonts is approaching zero, and from the history I know of these old fonts, there was a lot of borrowing even back then).

Yes - while working on this pack I did look into the question of copyright on the original bitmap fonts; what I found seems to indicate that the designs may not be copyrightable as such (e.g.: http://forum.osdev.org/viewtopic.php?p=164817#p164817 ), although I'd still rather err on the side of caution, hence the disclaimer at the end of the readme. If they were copyrightable, I imagine that IBM would've sued graphics…

I joked on the Libreoffice IRC developer channel that we would include them in the 5.2 release :-) nobody trouted me, which is a worry.

Re: The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack

#36

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #12

What I'd really like to see is a font that has lots of sub- and super-scripts and other mathy symbols, like: ⎛⎜⎝⎞⎟⎠⎡⎢⎣⎤⎥⎦⎧⎩⎪⎫⎬⎭⎮ so that I can keep my class notes in text files. So far the only font I found that supports a lot of that sort of thing is DejaVu Sans mono but even that is rather sparse- there's very few Greek letter super/subscripts say, and there's a limited selection of Latin superscripts. Block elemen…

Hi folks, thanks for the suggestions.

I know about pragmata pro and unifont. I've tried Unifont, I think it hurt my eyes a bit but it sure has lots of glyphs. Pragmata is very pretty and has great coverage but it's not free and I don't see that it has more glyphs than free fonts, for instance with DejaVu mono I have a subscript for j which I don't see in Pragmata. Or, the APL glyphs for instance; unifont has them too and it's free.

I'll give ReactOS a try, thanks. I had given up hope to be honest, I guess Unicode is just too big to implement fully.

Edit: Ok, Pragmata costs €19 for just the regular weight- I thought it was costed by unicode range. I could definitely give that a try, so thanks for the hint mietek.

2nd Edit: Ouch, no- the mono font is €59. That's too high again :)

Re: The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack

#37

Post by chris_wot »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #35
chris_wot wrote: post #33

The kerning is dreadful.

I can't decide if this is sarcasm or not, so forgive me if it was. These are monospace fonts because the character modes in which these fonts were used were strictly grid-based.

I was being flippant and did it for the yucks :-)

Re: The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack

#38

Post by rbanffy »

bitwize wrote: post #28
rbanffy wrote: post #26

I always wonder why IBM chose these horrible serif designs over their previous, much nicer, cleaner, fonts you can find on their 32xx terminals...

The double-width vertical strokes improve visibility.

If you look at the fonts used in Atari and Commodore computers, you'll see double width vertical strokes, few serifs and an overall nicer-looking font, very readable.

It's also worth noting they had no such restriction on their TTL-based monitors.

Re: The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack

#39

Post by rbanffy »

ddingus wrote: post #31
bitwize wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The double-width vertical strokes improve visibility.

They also help on composite displays, still a significant consideration at the time the PC was created. PAL didn't suffer too much from this, but NTSC did. Single pixel verticals light up in a rainbow of color. This is actually how the monochrome Apple 2 did it's color graphics! White on blue is a secondary helper here. On sharp displays, the human eye sees the white text at full detail. Humans have only a fraction o…

I think the only PC ever to ship with composite video output was the PC Jr. (edit: sadly, no, it wasn't)

I became fond of the white on blue scheme with the MSX machines, but kind of abandoned it when I moved to PCs.

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