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The Oldschool PC Font Pack v2.0

int10h.org

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Re: The Oldschool PC Font Pack v2.0

#51

Post by bitwize »

dilandau wrote: post #44
klodolph wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

>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?

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.

Re: The Oldschool PC Font Pack v2.0

#52

Post by bitwize »

dilandau wrote: post #45
bitwize wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.

Re: The Oldschool PC Font Pack v2.0

#53

Post by dang »

sep wrote: post #50
dang wrote: post #46

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 dis…

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.]

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.

Re: The Oldschool PC Font Pack v2.0

#54

Post by api »

klodolph wrote: post #36
api wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

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.

Re: The Oldschool PC Font Pack v2.0

#55

Post by klodolph »

dilandau wrote: post #44
klodolph wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

>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?

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.

Re: The Oldschool PC Font Pack v2.0

#56

Post by sep »

dang wrote: post #53
sep wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.]

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 th…

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.

Re: The Oldschool PC Font Pack v2.0

#57

Post by dang »

sep wrote: post #56
dang wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

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 mor…

Alright, we'll remove the dupe penalty.

Re: The Oldschool PC Font Pack v2.0

#58

Post by viler »

duskwuff wrote: post #48
viler wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

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.

To sum it up (links to the various tools can be found at https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/readme/#tools_used): usually the starting point is some sort of raw bitmap data, which I convert to .png with something like Binxelview, although ImageMagick can also do the trick. The .png then goes into Bits'N'Picas to trace the glyphs and produces an outlined .ttf.

This .ttf is far from final however, as it still needs an encoding with proper Unicode mapping, some height/metric adjustments, and so on. The specific changes depend on the font, but they can be done in Fontforge, which is very scriptable thankfully. The same goes for things like aspect correction (mark all glyphs, scale down on the X-axis) and producing embedded bitmaps (add "bitmap strikes" at the target pixel/point sizes, export w/"bitmap in TTF/OTF" option).

Fontforge's bitmap export options should also let you create bitmap-only fonts in formats like .bdf or .otb. As I still use only .fon for bitmap fonts (though this should change in the future), I do those in a different program named Fony, which like Bits'N'Picas can import the glyphs from a .png and export to .fon after some adjustments and metadata massaging.

More details than that would probably belong in a blog post or so, but that's it in a nutshell.

Re: The Oldschool PC Font Pack v2.0

#59

Post by cellularmitosis »

brirec wrote: post #37
mceachen wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just recently found an adafruit guide to building a solaris 2.6 setup using QEMU. The nostalgia!

https://learn.adafruit.com/build-your-own-sparc-with-qemu-an...

edit: just remembered that you sadly don't get to see Sun Gallant Demi in all its glory, because it boots using the QEMU openfirmware.

Re: The Oldschool PC Font Pack v2.0

#60

Post by badsectoracula »

bitwize wrote: post #51
dilandau wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

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.

> X11 maintainers jumped ship to Wayland.

Some maintainers, last time i checked others like Keith Packard are working exclusively on Xorg.

> Once again, just about everyone who knows thing one about graphics on Linux is on board with the Wayland transition.

I know "thing one" about graphics on Linux and i'm certainly not on board with Wayland transition.

> Just like everyone who knows thing one about virology or epidemiology is on board with social distancing and wearing a mask.

That is not a good comparison.

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