> This monitor has a lot of pixels by decade-ago standards, but its pixel density leaves much to be desired by today standards. I have accidentally become accustomed to crisp, small fonts by a couple of years of using an old Retina Macbook. Bitmap fonts are better at this than scalable fonts, especially on screens with low pixel density.
IMO these are all the right reasons. I also suffer from a bad purchase: 27" FullHD Monitor, which means 82dpi (if I remember correctly). But even at more common resolutions like 90-100dpi, vector fonts totally suck at small sizes. So bitmap fonts it is for coding work.
However this font clearly suffers from being only 5x10 size. The characters look similar to vector fonts without antialiasing: Random disproportions -- the same line is 1px here, 2px over there.
What's not to like about the default font that comes with xterm (6x13 size)?
That's one of my favourites too --- the only "what's not to like" about it is the nonslashed zero, but that's easily fixed with a suitable font or even hex editor.
There is a 5x7 in the same family, but I find it too small for regular use; on the other hand, it looks much like the standard font on embedded systems' character LCDs, which are much lower DPI.
Primarily just that it's too tall - 13 vs 10 pixels means the difference between 100 lines and 130. And yep! It's really hard to get an even look at a size this small.
Wow, that's an awesome one I hadn't seen! The best way to get recommendations on HN seems to be "make an approximation of the thing you want - others will point you to the version that you should have made"
Yeah! I was actually using progsole before making this - I'm primarily interested in squeezing legible characters into pixels, and progsole is sliiiightly wider. Even the difference between 5 and 6 pixels can be substantial if you're trying to keep 6 files in your head at once.
I can see the point of licenses on vector fonts containing nontrivial characters with many complex shapes etc., but at these small pixel sizes it seems like a bit of a fool's errand to talk about licensing/IP at all --- e.g. there's only so many ways to put pixels on a 6x13 grid and make it look recognisable as the letter 'M'. Hence all these small bitmapped fonts are extremely similar, with only slight variations in things like serifs/lack thereof, slashed zero/plain zero/rounded zero/etc. --- which are themselves a handful of pixels' difference. They all look almost like xterm6x13, which is public domain.
All works should have a free license. It's better to be safe (I'll just add a licence anyway) than sorry (I didn't add a license and now users are technically violating copyright). If a court decides otherwise, that's a separate issue. But until that court case, I will continue to license everything I make under free licenses.
I liked this style of font when I had an 800x600 laptop or even 1280x800 but with today's screens it's just to small. Making it large enough to look visible works better with a vector font.
I don't understand what the employer thinks they're gaining by making you work with two small monitors. I mean they're saving, what, $500? They'd recoup that amount in productivity gains within a week, tops.
Forcing your employees to use blunt saws when sharp saws are cheap is the most shortsighted of false economies.
There's no force involved - the gains of a slightly higher-res monitor aren't worth the $500, even just to me personally. It was worth the time and the (negative cost of) learning, though!
Font Book says the dfont file fails "System Validation", whatever that means, and warns they might cause system disruption. Anyone know what this means? Ignorable?
5x10 without subpixel support is super limiting, and the result reflects that. I assume you'd get used to it, but I really have to work hard to read this font.
Subpixel rendering would give the font 3x the horizontal resolution. Its just as useful for bitmap fonts as it is for vector fonts. Especially at that resolution, anything that makes the font more legible would be a boon.
Some years back I built a family of fonts around the idea of anti-aliased raster fonts realized as regular truetype outlines - http://pippin.gimp.org/0xA000/ - in which some variants of the family is designed to be crisp on many integer multiples of the base design size.
> Glean is released under version 3 of the GNU GPL, or any later version.
While I love the GPL (and commend you for using it on a non-software work) I would recommend that you add the font exception to the licence (allowing embedding of the font in documents without licencing the document under GPL).
I use a standard vector font in small size, around 5x8 pixels. The inherent antialiasing can give far more visual information cues than just pure binary bitmaps. The high-frequency edges of small bitmap characters are also much harsher, making AA vector fonts easier to look at.
(Liberation Mono, 6pt, greyscale antialiasing, no hinting, default 96dpi setting)
Explore your available fonts to see which happens to scale down reasonably. Make sure to disable font hinting when using vector fonts at small sizes. Hinting absolutely destroys the shapes at those sizes, as the ~1 pixel fudging that lines get is massive relative to the glyph size of just a handful of pixels.
Oh, Ubuntu has weird rules that prevent you from using bitmapped fonts. There's some configuration file in /etc/fontsomethingorother that you need to delete. I forget the specifics. After that you should be able to drop the bdf files into ~/.local/share/fonts (preferred) or ~/.fonts, run fc-cache, and see it show up in applications.
IMO these are all the right reasons. I also suffer from a bad purchase: 27" FullHD Monitor, which means 82dpi (if I remember correctly). But even at more common resolutions like 90-100dpi, vector fonts totally suck at small sizes. So bitmap fonts it is for coding work.
However this font clearly suffers from being only 5x10 size. The characters look similar to vector fonts without antialiasing: Random disproportions -- the same line is 1px here, 2px over there.
What's not to like about the default font that comes with xterm (6x13 size)? http://jstimpfle.de/dateisalat/2016-10-xterm-screenshot/