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Bitmap fonts make computers feel like computers again

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Re: Bitmap fonts make computers feel like computers again

#81

Post by VorpalWay »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #60
VorpalWay wrote: post #22

I use Terminus TTF for my terminal and text editor. I fully agree with their description of it as a workhorse font. The Gohu font they mention also seem interesting. In general bitmap fonts avoid the blurryness of modern font rendering made for high DPI monitors, which fails spectacularly on low DPI monitors (which is what I still have). And blurry text give me literal headaches. And this is why I gave up on anything…

Subpixel antialiasing works really well on low DPI monitors, though. When Microsoft implemented it, it felt like magic compared to bitmapped or regular font aliasing.

I disagree on this, the colour bleeding is visible and causes me actual headaches. I know not everyone is affected by that, but if you google this, a small but significant number of people can't use cleartype because of that.

Re: Bitmap fonts make computers feel like computers again

#82

Post by nottorp »

enriquto wrote: post #50

Conspicuously missing to this list is uwe's ttyp0 [0]. One of the few bitmap fonts (with terminus) having somewhat complete unicode support and going to very large pixel sizes, so that they are visible on modern screens with tiny pixels. [0] https://people.mpi-inf.mpg.de/~uwe/misc/uw-ttyp0/

The greybeard font says it's ttyp0 with some hacks for windows.

Re: Bitmap fonts make computers feel like computers again

#83

Post by tapete1 »

ryandrake wrote: post #14
ddtaylor wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Attacking the source of the message instead of the merits. Ad-HomineLLM

We need an update to the HN posting guidelines that addresses this. We already have: Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting. I'm not welcome to complain that the website is a tiny vertical strip down my screen with 6 inches of whitespace on each side, so we should also not welcome the boring, com…

You are wrong in this regard. If you complain about "6 inches of whitespace on each side", you should read this on a proper device (i.e. a desktop computer) or just inject some CSS to fix the site (this is HN, after all).

But knowing that the article is AI generated is useful, because that tells me to not to read it.

Re: Bitmap fonts make computers feel like computers again

#84

Post by ASalazarMX »

VorpalWay wrote: post #81
ASalazarMX wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Subpixel antialiasing works really well on low DPI monitors, though. When Microsoft implemented it, it felt like magic compared to bitmapped or regular font aliasing.

I disagree on this, the colour bleeding is visible and causes me actual headaches. I know not everyone is affected by that, but if you google this, a small but significant number of people can't use cleartype because of that.

I can see (ha ha) how annoying that could be. Like trying to force-focus something that isn't focusable at all.

Re: Bitmap fonts make computers feel like computers again

#85

Post by tracker1 »

susam wrote: post #38

A few years ago, when I wrote my own Invaders-like game [1], I was quite unhappy with the rendering quality of the HTML Canvas fillText() method. The antialiasing introduced multiple shades of green, whereas I wanted to render the text in a solid monochrome green while the glyphs retained their crisp, jagged edges. Although `canvas { image-rendering: pixelated }` improved the crispness and jaggedness, it could not en…

Note, if you're going to use the EGA 8x14 or VGA 9x16 fonts for rendering, your best bet is to also render each pixel 3 pixels wide and 4 pixels tall, then scale to your desired size... I do this, then the 50% of the scaled render looks pretty good, this corrects for the original 4:3 non-square aspect ratio of EGA and VGA level text.

I did this for my canvas renderer for BBS Ansi... Though, I need to get the next step(s) so I can start testing against a websocket based door server I'm also working on.

https://bbs-land.github.io/webterm-dos-ansi/

Re: Bitmap fonts make computers feel like computers again

#86

Post by agumonkey »

trollbridge wrote: post #72
agumonkey wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the nostalgia doesn't check all the boxes, even though yeah it's hard to deny, but it embodies a different mindset, a strange limited visual form that promised the future. it was also its own kind of design and aesthetic, today we have infinitely capable machines and all possible fonts but we lost that difference. ps: i have the same relationship to vintage desktop computer form factor, something about an old blocky…

One odd thing I have noticed is that my young children think a COMPAQ Portable III (not the machine I had as a youngster, but similar) is far more interesting to them than a modern, sleek MacBook. I think it's because they can touch it and turn it on and off, it simply occupies more physical space, and it makes more "interesting" noises.

Yes, it's close to what I'm feeling. I booted a pentium 2 era Dell desktop and all the physical aspects (volume, surface, motor noise, activity led) made me feel happier. It's partly emotional but also informational, I'm informed of what is there and what is happening (for disk activity led it's also very very useful, I miss that on hdd and usb keys all the time). Todays machines are unbelievably powerful but it's basically a nanoscopic blackbox out of reach for your mind.

Re: Bitmap fonts make computers feel like computers again

#87

Post by vonunov »

phainopepla2 wrote: post #48
lukeasch21 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so bad that whenever I click on blog post I don't start by reading the content, first I skim to see if it's even worth my time. This one is not. > The part I keep coming back to Immediately caught my eye. Reading in... > Bitmap fonts make computers feel like computers again. Not abstract “digital products”. Not generic interfaces. Not frictionless panels pretending to be neutral. Actual computers. Aaand there it…

It's gotten to the point where I barely even skim first. I sort of unfocus my eyes and can sometimes see the shape of LLM writing. Sort of like when I'm birding and I switch from eagle vision to owl vision, and I can ID a bird just by catching the way the light reflects off its wingflash in the corner of my vision.

>And, just as I can now recognize Christian music in three notes or less, I can spot ChatGPT output without necessarily even reading any one contiguous string of it. I can just tell by the shape or something.¹

1. https://v-n-n-v.github.io/chatgpt-voice.html (bit outdated now, from 2025-03)

Re: Bitmap fonts make computers feel like computers again

#88

Post by UweW »

cmdrk wrote: post #40
VorpalWay wrote: post #22

I use Terminus TTF for my terminal and text editor. I fully agree with their description of it as a workhorse font. The Gohu font they mention also seem interesting. In general bitmap fonts avoid the blurryness of modern font rendering made for high DPI monitors, which fails spectacularly on low DPI monitors (which is what I still have). And blurry text give me literal headaches. And this is why I gave up on anything…

100% the same problem here. I have to show people extremely zoomed-in screenshots of how $VENDOR default monospaced fonts get rendered compared to Terminus at the correct size in order for them to understand my pain. The hinting is just blurry bleh. These days, because I am also old, I want a comparatively large pixel-perfect font. I've yet to find a good one but haven't looked much beyond Terminus honestly. Maybe I…

For Linux and *BSD, UW ttyp0 (v2.1) goes up to 18x40px. Greybeard is essentially UW ttyp0 ported to Windows, but since it's based on UW ttyp0 v1.3, the largest bitmap size is only 11x22px.
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