I came across this website when I was looking for IBM PC OEM fonts for a little HTML + Canvas-based invaders-like game I was developing a few years ago. It is impressive how much effort VileR has poured into recovering each OEM font and their countless variants, from a wide range of ROMs. The site not only archives them all with incredible attention to detail, but also offers live previews, aspect ratio correction and other thoughtful features that make exploring it a joy. I've spent numerous hours there comparing different OEM fonts and hunting down the best ones to use in my own work!
I've been using the Px437 Verite 9x6 font from this pack as my main terminal font for years now, and couldn't be happier with it. VileR's font pack is great for both retro use cases, like displaying ANSI art, and for modern ones.
Site isn't loading but I have a neat side project that works with any monospace font that includes Unicode glyphs which converts raw binary to unicode and back while passing through 7-bit ASCII characters, replacing control characters with related symbol representations, and sticking with actually-monospace glyphs (a surprising number of glyphs break the width rule across various "monospace" fonts), while ALSO being denser and more directly legible than hex encoding: https://github.com/pmarreck/printable-binary
Each UTF8 character (1 to 3 bytes) corresponds to 1 byte of input data. The average increase in data size is about 70%, but you gain binary independence in any medium that understands utf8 (email, the terminal, unit tests, etc.)
The favicon is either exactly or a really close copy of The Grate Book of Moo's logo. Hopefully that's not too obscure for Hacker News, but you never know.
> Unscii is a set of bitmapped Unicode fonts based on classic system fonts. Unscii attempts to support character cell art well while also being suitable for terminal and programming use.
It took several seconds to load for me, so here's the first paragraph. It's a good first paragraph, though!
I like the look of this a lot! Especially how condensed it is, similar to my favorite monospace TrueType font Iosevka Term. The ANSI color rendering looks phenomenal.
I'll definitely give this a try in my Linux TTY. Thanks for sharing!
Slightly off-topic but related.
See also: The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack from VileR at <https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/>.
I came across this website when I was looking for IBM PC OEM fonts for a little HTML + Canvas-based invaders-like game I was developing a few years ago. It is impressive how much effort VileR has poured into recovering each OEM font and their countless variants, from a wide range of ROMs. The site not only archives them all with incredible attention to detail, but also offers live previews, aspect ratio correction and other thoughtful features that make exploring it a joy. I've spent numerous hours there comparing different OEM fonts and hunting down the best ones to use in my own work!
I've been using the Px437 Verite 9x6 font from this pack as my main terminal font for years now, and couldn't be happier with it. VileR's font pack is great for both retro use cases, like displaying ANSI art, and for modern ones.
Viznut also made a audio / visual live coding tool IBNIZ, used it for a performance once it's fire
http://viznut.fi/ibniz/
I just tested and my local nerdfont[1] does not support a bunch of those graphical glyphs, perhaps that is something that could be added.
[1] https://www.nerdfonts.com
I got incredibly accurate output on my terminal emulator using a nerd font (st with Iosevka Nerd Font, tmux, links2 browser).
Out of curiosity I checked with lsof, apparently other fonts are used as fallback:
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSans-Bold.ttf
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/droid/DroidSansFallbackFull.ttf
/usr/local/share/fonts/MS/segmdl2.ttf
/usr/local/share/fonts/MS/seguisym.ttf
/usr/local/share/fonts/nerd/Iosevka/IosevkaNerdFont-Regular.ttf
/usr/local/share/fonts/nerd/JetBrainsMono/JetBrainsMonoNerdFontMono-Regular.ttf
At least the result is perfect!
https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts/issues/1959
Thanks for filing that. I was slightly confused by the appearance of the red race car.
Nerdfont sucks as it's non-standard.
Why is that important?
It deviates from the Unicode standard. It's doomed to fail.
there's enough support for it across various things that it's not going anywhere
Everything in life is temporary. If it lasts while I use it, it's as good to me as if it lasts forever.
ASCII and Unicode will outlast us. Not the case with Nerd fonts.
Site isn't loading but I have a neat side project that works with any monospace font that includes Unicode glyphs which converts raw binary to unicode and back while passing through 7-bit ASCII characters, replacing control characters with related symbol representations, and sticking with actually-monospace glyphs (a surprising number of glyphs break the width rule across various "monospace" fonts), while ALSO being denser and more directly legible than hex encoding: https://github.com/pmarreck/printable-binary
Each UTF8 character (1 to 3 bytes) corresponds to 1 byte of input data. The average increase in data size is about 70%, but you gain binary independence in any medium that understands utf8 (email, the terminal, unit tests, etc.)
> ... you gain binary independence in any medium that understands utf8
Nice work! But if you want something like this in production, base64 only increases the size by 33%.
This is perfect. I'm currently creating a MUD and these are exactly the kind of fonts I want. Thanks for sharing!
With sixel support finally comming to terminals
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixel
we are full circle, 40 year later.
The favicon is either exactly or a really close copy of The Grate Book of Moo's logo. Hopefully that's not too obscure for Hacker News, but you never know.
This is conveniently timed, I was planning on doing a cool retro-y WindowMaker rice over christmas break. Better than Liberation Sans
> Unscii is a set of bitmapped Unicode fonts based on classic system fonts. Unscii attempts to support character cell art well while also being suitable for terminal and programming use.
It took several seconds to load for me, so here's the first paragraph. It's a good first paragraph, though!
Are you on dialup? :D
The 'net on dialup (good dialup at least) isn't that bad with JavaScript and images disabled. Better yet on a text based browser like Lynx or Offpunk
Or with gopher with gopher://magical.fish and gopher://hngopher.com
Also:
https://farside.link
https://lite.cnn.com
https://text.npr.org
Thank God! You saved me.
I won't have to wait seconds (!!!) to read it
I'm thankful that GP spoke up.
I come to the comments to find out what these "clickbait title" articles (meaningless words with no context) really are before clicking.
Secondly, the site appears to be "hug of death"'d at the moment. I presume it was still accessible but struggling when OP posted.
Reminds me of UDG graphics on the sinclair spectrum. I like the example of the image in the article very cool art.
I like the look of this a lot! Especially how condensed it is, similar to my favorite monospace TrueType font Iosevka Term. The ANSI color rendering looks phenomenal.
I'll definitely give this a try in my Linux TTY. Thanks for sharing!
could also suit Termux (Android linux terminal) well. Will try it asap
How to install it?
Can't wait until somebody makes a game hit in Steam using unscii as every UI in the game.
looks very useful. And skillful! Very careful typographic reasoning when creating the glyphs from the classic originals.
This would probably work great with the monospace web framework.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41370020
That ' is tilted kinda ruins it for me as a programming font, but otherwise looks really nice.
Oh hey, this is the font used by the Minecraft mod OpenComputers.