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The Oldschool PC Font Pack v2.0

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Re: The Oldschool PC Font Pack v2.0

#31

Post by klodolph »

badsectoracula wrote: post #24
bitwize wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes sense. Bdf is an X11 format, and X is deprecated technology. X font rendering is certainly deprecated.

> 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.

> 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.

Re: The Oldschool PC Font Pack v2.0

#32

Post by bloopernova »

cerberusss wrote: post #25
bloopernova wrote: post #15

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...

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?

When you hit stop-a to emergency-halt the system, you'd see this console.

Re: The Oldschool PC Font Pack v2.0

#33

Post by [deleted] »

Exmoor wrote: post #16

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.

[deleted]

Re: The Oldschool PC Font Pack v2.0

#34

Post by bitwize »

dilandau wrote: post #27
bitwize wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes sense. Bdf is an X11 format, and X is deprecated technology. X font rendering is certainly deprecated.

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.

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.

Re: The Oldschool PC Font Pack v2.0

#36

Post by klodolph »

api wrote: post #28
dilandau wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 infinit…

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.

Re: The Oldschool PC Font Pack v2.0

#37

Post by brirec »

mceachen wrote: post #30
cerberusss wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

Solaris 2.6 and 7 didn’t have a graphical boot splash, so you’d see this while watching a SPARC box boot up.

Re: The Oldschool PC Font Pack v2.0

#40

Post by kmill »

plg wrote: post #38

WOW there is a strange visual illusion for me, the red fonts seem to be sitting 3D the rest of the page

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.

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