
Unscii – A set of bitmapped Unicode fonts based on classic system fonts - vanni
http://pelulamu.net/unscii/
======
makecheck
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.

~~~
heywire
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?

~~~
makecheck
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](http://www.macterm.net/images/BoxDrawingMacTerm.png)

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

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

~~~
conistonwater
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.

~~~
makecheck
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.

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WorldMaker
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.

~~~
vanni
PUA (from
[http://www.unicode.org/faq/private_use.html](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)._

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

[http://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=12795](http://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=12795)

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twoquestions
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.

~~~
jaclaz
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](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](http://www.babelstone.co.uk/Software/BabelMap.html)

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throwaway161215
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.

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jquast
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.

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endgame
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/

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

~~~
dzdt
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!

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userbinator
_" 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](https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs-fonts.html)

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vanni
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.

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ZenPsycho
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.

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

[https://twitter.com/viznut/status/693596605157629953](https://twitter.com/viznut/status/693596605157629953)

[https://twitter.com/viznut/status/698240751491293185](https://twitter.com/viznut/status/698240751491293185)

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jxy
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, ↑↓.

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mixmastamyk
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.

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BuuQu9hu
Heh, the tarball contains a full copy of the version 1.0 tarball.

