The Oldschool PC Font Pack v2.0 • Hacker News Board

Re: The Oldschool PC Font Pack v2.0

#71

Post by int_19h » Sat, Jul 18, 2020, 2:54 PM UTC

viler wrote: post #70

int_19h wrote: post #68

I wish somebody made a bitmap font based on VGA 8x16, but scaled up to look nice on 4K screens. I'd seriously pay for that.

https://int10h.org/blog/2018/05/flexi-ibm-vga-scalable-truet... ? :) (Edit: not a bitmap font, but to make it scalable to arbitrary sizes it pretty much has to be an outlined .ttf).

Nope, that's not it. An algorithmic approach won't do here - it needs an actual human filling pixels in on the basis of aesthetics rather than math.

It doesn't have to be scalable to arbitrary sizes - 2x of the original would do just fine on a wide variety of high-DPI screens, just as the original itself worked on a very broad historical range of non-high-DPI ones.

Re: The Oldschool PC Font Pack v2.0

#72

Post by viler » Sat, Jul 18, 2020, 3:11 PM UTC

int_19h wrote: post #71

viler wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://int10h.org/blog/2018/05/flexi-ibm-vga-scalable-truet... ? :) (Edit: not a bitmap font, but to make it scalable to arbitrary sizes it pretty much has to be an outlined .ttf).

Nope, that's not it. An algorithmic approach won't do here - it needs an actual human filling pixels in on the basis of aesthetics rather than math. It doesn't have to be scalable to arbitrary sizes - 2x of the original would do just fine on a wide variety of high-DPI screens, just as the original itself worked on a very broad historical range of non-high-DPI ones.

OK, then I think I get what you mean - scaling up the glyphs 2x and adding more bitmap detail, but perceptually sticking to the original shapes as closely as possible.

That's something I thought of in the past but it proved trickier than I expected to actually get nice enough results, so I never actually got very far with it but it's not impossible.

Re: The Oldschool PC Font Pack v2.0

#73

Post by int_19h » Mon, Jul 20, 2020, 1:59 AM UTC

viler wrote: post #72

int_19h wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, that's not it. An algorithmic approach won't do here - it needs an actual human filling pixels in on the basis of aesthetics rather than math. It doesn't have to be scalable to arbitrary sizes - 2x of the original would do just fine on a wide variety of high-DPI screens, just as the original itself worked on a very broad historical range of non-high-DPI ones.

OK, then I think I get what you mean - scaling up the glyphs 2x and adding more bitmap detail, but perceptually sticking to the original shapes as closely as possible. That's something I thought of in the past but it proved trickier than I expected to actually get nice enough results, so I never actually got very far with it but it's not impossible.

Yep, it's basically high-res pixel art. So it needs a good artist, and a lot of time. I doubt anybody's likely to do it as a free project, hence why I mentioned paying for it - a crowdsourcing arrangement, perhaps