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Comment by sigil | Hacker News Reader

Wait a second, is this the same font used by QBASIC.EXE and EDIT.EXE?

This is Topaz, specifically the version used in the 1.x series of AmigaOS releases. It is very similar to the original IBM CGA/BIOS font but not identical.

The font names are edit.exe?

I always found it strange that fonts are executables and yet we hear so few uses of fonts as malware.

The Linux repo for Ms fonts seems like such a perfect way to get RCE on Linux computer due to the number of people that need some crappy Times New Roman for a paper submission requirement. They're even called TimesNewRoman.exe or Arial.exe.

Fonts are not executable files, those are the official redistributables by Microsoft to install those fonts on systems where they are missing. TrueType fonts are a highly complex file format though, so there have been plenty of RCEs due to broken font parsing in the past.

Fonts are not executables in the way you think they are. They do have code for hinting, but it is not executable in the sense of x86 or ARM code. It’s a custom bytecode designed for an interpreter. If a font is being distributed as an executable, that’s because someone’s wrapped it in an installer.

Maybe I misunderstand you: I believe they are saying that EDIT.EXE, an executable that edited text, used the Topaz font. Microsoft Word uses fonts, but those fonts aren't named "Word".

Yes and they're also extracted without execution if you install them on Linux. I believe they're self-extracting CABs

Nope. Microsoft had their own font that was different from Topaz.

Not quite. QBASIC.EXE/EDIT.EXE use the text mode ROM font. If you didn't load a specific font in DOS (e.g. to switch code pages), you'd get whatever your graphic card's ROM shipped with.

Fair, so I guess it was most often IBM’s font with those programs. It definitely wasn’t Topaz, though.

You’re right. Topaz is eerily familiar though, and I never used an Amiga. Wondering if a well-known MSDOS program used it. Turbo Pascal?

Those are text mode DOS programs and used whatever font was in the graphics card’s character ROM. Perhaps you’re thinking of IBM’s CGA or EGA fonts, which were somewhat similar.

https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/

I had a CGA graphics card, and it’s quite possible I’m remembering the CGA-2y font!

They were all similar in a lot of ways. There are only so many ways you can draw the Latin alphabet in an 8x8 grid. There were plenty of variants to be sure, with different baselines, serif vs sans, kinda of descenders, and all that. Still, it’s inevitable that several are going to look similar.

But Topaz was a Commodore font, and I’m sure no other OS distributed it.

If you're British, then you might recall 'The Chart Show' in the 80s/90s that used an Amiga interface as the overlay. Otherwise, it's pretty iconic..

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