My love of typography originated in the 80’s with the golden years of 8-bit home computing and their 8×8 pixel monospaced fonts on low-resolution displays.
It’s quite easy to find bitmap copies of these fonts and also scalable traced TTF versions but there’s very little discussion about the fonts themselves. Let’s remedy that by firing up some emulators and investigating the glyphs.
I’ve been looking at a lot of these 8bit fonts because of recent emulation efforts. I’d like to throw Visi On’s fonts into the fray, too.
I think Visi On is a 16 bit system, since it ran on IBM PC.
http://toastytech.com/guis/vision.html
Bronies will be the death of us all.
I do not, and have never watched, MLP. I just like that picture.
Don’t watch it, never ever : there are pink unicorns in it, you’ll get addicted !
Kochise
Is Thom gay?
Pink unicorn is a matter of something extremely rare and mysterious, Thom often make reference to them. Nothing to do with gayness. I guess. And even though it might, I don’t care, that’s Thom’s business, don’t you think ?
Kochise
Oh man, why did you have to mention the unicorns? You KNOW how Thom is about them.
We can just forget about any more updates to osnews now.
I was going to say it takes one to know one, but that would be as childish as calling Thom a horsefucker.
I’m also calling off topic
Speak for yourself, Mr. Hands.
My favorite system font was the 8×16 font that the Atari ST series used for its high res modes. What I liked is how it had double-thick lines for both vertical and horizontal strokes. This made it easier for me to read (less eye strain?) than console fonts on other systems like the PC.
Here^aEURTMs what it looked like:
http://www.dafont.com/atari-st-8×16-system-font.font
Edited 2014-05-29 14:09 UTC
Right, ST High font is one of the most readable and comfortable. Too sad it was not really ASCII conformant, hence accents between DOS and TOS were scrambled.
Kochise
Accents weren’t part of ASCII. You may be thinking of the “high ASCII” or “extended ASCII” of IBM PCs (and all the code page hell that came later on).
… have a look at this book.
Just My Type: A Book About Fonts
Simon Garfield
I was given it for present and loved it.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Just-My-Type-About-Fonts/dp/1846683025/ref=…
Standard software that came with Amiga computers included a bitmap font editor. I can’t think of another computer that included that as basic software. I was making my own fonts back in the 80’s. You really start to appreciate fonts when you make your own.
I liked the better bitmapped fonts on the Amiga too. Of-course many were horrible too.
When the font was matched to the need and resolution of the screen they could be very clear to read.
I don’t remember the name of the font, but there was one that was 10 pixels wide that made for good reading when on a BBS. Since it gave 64 characters per line it was a good match to most BBSs that always printing 40 or 64 columns per line.
Edited 2014-05-30 17:17 UTC
Well the reason I made so many fonts on the Amiga was because most of the available ones were crap. The original Topaz in WB 1.x was fine. I still don’t understand why they later modified it and made it so ugly in WB 2.0.
I would not say most were bad. Maybe 50%, what could be affecting my judgement is until the 24 pin dot matrix printer came along offering 216 DPI most fonts always looked better on the screen than on paper.
On the other hand Amiga’s Colour Fonts made a big impact of TV titling.
Yeah, mine were hideous.
I came the realization recently that all fonts are terrible. The best ones are the ones you don’t even notice.
> I’d like to throw Visi On’s fonts into the fray, too.
I ripped Visi On fonts from PCE emulator memory dump to BDF fonts (contains Normal/Bold/Italic fonts and also 2x height(8×16) fonts):
https://sites.google.com/site/rtfreesoft/file-drop/VisiOn.7z?attredi…