Show HN: Teletext TrueType Font | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Teletext TrueType Font

galax.xyz

22 pointsglxxyz11 comments

I just found that a Unicode working group cited this page! They are considering adding Teletext glyphs to Unicode:

https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2018/18235-terminals-prop.pdf

http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2019/19025-terminals-prop.pdf

Specs or otherwise, it's a pity this font doesn't support at least the full range of Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) characters. Otherwise it looks rad!

Yes, it would be good- I was only trying to reproduce the look of an authentic BBC Micro which was sort-of ASCII. The complete Teletext spec lists a lot more characters; probably all of Latin-1 and even Arabic and Cyrillic: http://www.galax.xyz/TELETEXT/TTXTSPEC.PDF

A few people have complained that it was missing characters for Danish, Swedish, and Finnish characters (they also had Teletext-type systems on their TVs. It's on the list of projects I'd like to complete.

That's nice to hear. I am Danish, and it is exactly the missing Danish national characters (Æ, Ø and Å) that prevents me from using the font, although having at least Latin-1 would be better.

I don't own a tv, but I often read news headlines from webified teletext at https://www.dr.dk/cgi-bin/fttx1.exe/110 and so I have sometimes contemplated having a personal website in the style of teletext.

I'm going to add a few of the Latin-1 characters this week. Quick question- how important are the double-height versions, and the multiple aspect ratios? It's slightly easier if I leave out the double height characters, and just publish the 1.0 (Square pixels) and 1.3 (TV stretched) aspect ratios.

If you start with 1.0 and 1.3, that sounds just fantastic! If you have more time and energy on a later occasion, you can always add to the collection.

I looked into this some more and a much better approach was taken by the creators of this Teletext font: http://bjh21.me.uk/bedstead/

Instead of creating characters by hand I'm going to see if I can modify the bedstead code to output SAA5050 square aliased pixels instead of the more modern looking diagonal lines that bedstead uses. If it works I'll publish the results here: https://github.com/glxxyz/bedstead - follow that repo or send me an email if you want to see how I got on. Cheers!

I'll be following the repo. Cheers, mate.

It was pretty easy to modify the Bedstead code, all fonts are available for download. Let me know if there are any issues!

Ah, the sublime text mode 7 used on the BBC micro. Uses only 1k of memory. Generated using the SAA7070 video chip.

You may also be interested to see these BeebFax that Pitfall Jones generated using my font:

1981: http://www.pitfalljones.com/bbc-beebfax/1981/page_100.htm

1982: http://www.pitfalljones.com/bbc-beebfax/1982/page_100.htm

1983: http://www.pitfalljones.com/bbc-beebfax/1983/page_100.htm

1984: http://www.pitfalljones.com/bbc-beebfax/1984/page_100.htm

It was also used for these pages that I know of:

https://www.mortimerbrewing.co.uk/

http://www.aqarius.net/

https://teletext.markgaze.dev/100

https://www.rivalsfootball.net/manchestercity/ (switch theme to TELETEXT)

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