Unscii – A set of bitmapped Unicode fonts based on classic system fonts | Hacker News Reader

Unscii – A set of bitmapped Unicode fonts based on classic system fonts

pelulamu.net

178 pointsvanni28 comments

I found line-drawing characters to be so inconsistent in fonts that I implemented them directly in my terminal emulator’s rendering code. For example, when I see a box-drawing symbol, I bypass the font completely and draw lines myself so that the result is guaranteed to align consistently with other cells and guaranteed to touch adjacent cells without any gaps from font layout engines. It’s amazing how much nicer it can be when you do this.

This font does remind me of a lot of other useful symbols though, beyond normal box-drawing sets.

Now you've got me curious, do you happen to have a screenshot? And is this a terminal emulator that you've written for existing operating systems, or part of your own?

For Mac, only.

I put some images here as examples, that use Markus Kuhn’s Unicode demo. MacTerm[0], iTerm2[1], and Apple Terminal[2]. As you can see, the box drawing is really messed up when fonts are relied upon in the other two terminals.

[0] http://www.macterm.net/images/BoxDrawingMacTerm.png

[1] http://www.macterm.net/images/BoxDrawingITerm2.png

[2] http://www.macterm.net/images/BoxDrawingAppleTerminal.png

In [1], why are the boxes of successively larger size out of order, on the right side of the image? It makes no sense to me how that'd happen.

Not sure, that's from iTerm2. :)

I can only guess that the symbols come from different fonts entirely (the Mac can perform such substitutions). The half-filled and all-filled variants may be easier for font designers to implement than the others so those two come from the chosen font while the rest come from a substituted font.

What you are doing is fine except that when some fonts have their own flavors of the box-drawing characters. See monofur for an example.

I'd considered adding at least a low-level preference to disable box-drawing overrides, and I still might. With the overrides though, you do not have to install any particular font to have accurate line-drawing, and you can see lines even when choosing a font that might not otherwise be designed for line-drawing.

rxvt-unicode does this, but I haven't see a need for it in xterm if your font isn't incomplete. If you're using UTF-8 and a Unicode TTF/OTF, then it's no problem in xterm, but other terminal emulators are not always drawing it as correctly so you certainly have a point here.

I did exactly the same thing for WordGrinder's virtual terminal (it's a terminal-based app; but for Windows and X, there are versions which implement their own terminal using GDI and Xlib respectively, for more consistent font and style rendering).

Screenshot:

https://get.google.com/albumarchive/118274112180368285367/al...

By comparison, this one's rxvt:

https://get.google.com/albumarchive/118274112180368285367/al...

This is rather cool. It seems like the research into older system line drawing symbols (towards the bottom of the document) and which fills the PUA section of the font might make a good basis for a Unicode proposal to add some of them.

PUA (from http://www.unicode.org/faq/private_use.html):

Q: What are private-use characters?

A: Private-use characters are code points whose interpretation is not specified by a character encoding standard and whose use and interpretation may be determined by private agreement among cooperating users. Private-use characters are sometimes also referred to as user-defined characters (UDC) or vendor-defined characters (VDC).

(slightly OT) This reminded me of DawnBringer's 16 Col Palette v1.0:

http://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=12795

Very cool! I was considering getting into pixel art as well as ASCII art, and this looks like a great resource!

Is there a book or something anywhere that tells you how to print different color characters/backgrounds to the terminal or to the screen? I know how to do this in CSS on a webpage, but not on a terminal.

Also, is there a way to see all of the characters in a specific font? The only thing that shows for me when I try to preview a font in Windows is "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. 1234567890" which is great for writing, but not so great for art.

There are tools for that, a good simple one (IMHO ) is "Unicode Font Viewer":

http://www.soft-gems.net/index.php/tools/unicode-font-viewer

For some more sophisticated browsing of Unicode fonts (actually more "Unicode availability"), this is good:

http://www.babelstone.co.uk/Software/BabelMap.html

It depends upon your chosen medium.

For most terminals, you could print ansi escape codes to color sections of the text output. As with any software, there are disjoint sets of coverage. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/287871/print-in-terminal-...

On the other hand, I've seen a number of node.js based terminals, that could be used similarly. https://hyper.is/

While the other suggestion for unicode text viewer is fine, I've used font forge to see the rest of some fonts.

I've recently converted the console and kernel PSFU format of Sun12x22 (Sparc OpenFirmware font) to BDF and then PCF for use in xterm. It works well and looks as beautiful and pleasing from a typography perspective as it did 20 years ago, but it's hard to use because it's too large unless you're using it on a 4k display.

I guess my question is if there's a smaller or even scalable (outline format) of Sun12x22 that preserves pretty typography while allowing me to use on displays smaller than 4k.

I know only two telnet bbs software systems that use Utf8 rather than classic 8-bit codepages mentioned here. If anyone would like to see art try them out: 1984.ws (mine, Python) and htc.zapto.org (a friends, C++).

Haven't tried it yet but it should work. I too am dissapointed that recent ascii and cp437/"ansi art" continues to be released in old MSDOS encodings rather than UTF8, I guess mainly because the editors like pablodraw don't support it.

The bbs and art scene is a very closed source community, so these things really can't change very easily even if we wanted them too--folks like myself had to write entirely new software rather than contribute changes to existing.

This is fantastic, but if you want to go the other way and chase hardware accuracy, the oldschool pc font pack at int10h.org is very cool: int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/

Hmmm. The page says "VT100: horizontal lines in different Y positions" are non-unicode characters, except those exist: ⎺⎻─⎼⎽

I imagine the terminal font actually had a potential line at each pixel.

Probably the author was using an old unicode reference. They were added relatively late, in Unicode 3.2. Or could be he just missed them!

"unscii-16-full" falls under GPL because of how Unifont is licensed

You can have a public-domain font if you take the Unicode glyphs from these instead:

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs-fonts.html

From the post:

    No commonly accepted Unicode graphics font,
    no Unicode art scene; no art scene, no font support.
    The idea of an art-compatible Unicode font was born.

I posted this same link just 10 hours earlier than vanni and got no traction. goes to show how timing is everything here. anyhow- on a more relevant note: it would be great if the leftover characters they found here made it into unicode someday. it would make it possible to represent "texts" from these old microcomputers accurately, a goal analogous to wanting to represent various historical texts accurately.

Tweets about Unscii by its author Ville-Matias Heikkilä (viznut):

https://twitter.com/viznut/status/693596605157629953

https://twitter.com/viznut/status/698240751491293185

This is fantastic. You can almost use it as a serious console font, except for the single quote being only two pixels. And there is a whole suite of CJK characters. But the up and down arrows are not symmetric, ↑↓.

Mattel Aquarius! Forgot that existed. Once upon a time I had an Intellivision and fantasized over those accessories in the catalog. Good thing I never got one, it was a big flop as I remember.

Heh, the tarball contains a full copy of the version 1.0 tarball.

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