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| || _ || __|| < | -__|| _| | || -__|| | | ||__ --|
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on Gopher (inofficial)
HTML Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
HTML Unscii
Levitating wrote 5 hours 22 min ago:
I found this when searching for a bitmap font.
I ended up writing a rust parser for the .hex file format for use in my
kernel[1]. So I can now display the fantasy kernel on bare-metal :)
[1]
HTML [1]: https://github.com/LevitatingBusinessMan/runix/blob/limine/src...
kazinator wrote 10 hours 38 min ago:
Constantine Bytensky's "cnxt" font is sort of in this vein also. If
you're interested in unscii, you might also like cnxt.
CNXT = Constantine's Nine x Twenty
HTML [1]: https://github.com/cbytensky/cnxt
xenodium wrote 10 hours 42 min ago:
These are lovely. I miss some of that ASCII art quirkiness, so I added
it to my blogging platform (as ASCII art banners)
HTML [1]: https://lmno.lol
kragen wrote 11 hours 26 min ago:
Seems related to the discussion the other day of Unifont, which is an
8Ã16/16Ã16 Unicode bitmap font: [1] A great deficiency of Unifont
mentioned several times in the other thread was its lack of
combining-character support, and the absence of alternative glyphs for
the code points in scripts like Arabic (well, and Engsvanyáli) whose
form is affected by joiner or non-joiner context. Does anyone know if
Unscii does better at this?
From opening it in Fontforge, Unscii seems to have pretty broad
coverage, including things like Bengali, Ethiopic, and even runic, plus
pretty full CJK(V) coverage. It seems to have some of the CSUR [2]
assignments, such as the Tengwar of Feanor in the range U+E000 to
U+E07F, but has conflicting assignments for some other ranges, like the
Cirth range U+E080 to U+E0FF (present in Unifont but arguably
duplicative with the runic block), which is assigned to
Teletext/Videotex block mosaics. I note that my system has different
conflicting assignments for this range, with Tux at U+E000 followed by
a bunch of dingbats, while the Cirth range is a bunch of math symbols.
Given that astral-plane support is virtually universal in Unicode
implementations these days (thanks largely to emoji) it might be better
for future such efforts to use SPUA and SPUB to reduce the frequency of
such codepoint clashes. SPUA and SPUB are each the size of the entire
BMP: [3] For day-to-day use of semigraphic characters, I ran into the
problem two hours ago in [4] that the "BOX DRAWING" vertical lines
don't connect, consequently failing to draw proper boxes. I had the
same problem in Dercuano, where I fixed it by reducing the line-height
for elements. The reason seems to be that Firefox defaults
line-height to "normal", which is apparently equivalent to "1.41em",
which doesn't sound very normal to me (isn't an "em" defined as the
normal line height?), and, although the line-drawing characters in my
font (which seems to be Noto Sans Mono) are taller than 1em, they still
don't reliably join up if the line-height is taller than 1.21em.
Chromium does the same thing, except its abnormal definition of
"normal" is evidently more like 1.35em.
It's probably too late to make a change to the standard HN stylesheet
so major as
pre { line-height: 1.2em }
since it would change the rendering of the previous decades of
comments. It would be a significant improvement for things like what I
was doing there, and I don't think it would be worse for normal code
samples. However, given the lengths to which the HN codebase goes to
limit formatting (replacing characters like U+2009 THIN SPACE with
regular spaces, stripping out not just emojis but most
non-alphanumeric Unicode such as U+263A WHITE SMILING FACE, etc.)
maybe discouraging the use of these semigraphics is intentional?
If not, though, perhaps the fact that the line-height is already
different between Chromium and Firefox represents a certain amount of
possible flexibility...
Obviously the line-height would be a much more serious problem for the
kinds of diagonal semigraphic characters that viznut is largely
focusing on here; those would strictly require a line-height of exactly
1em, which I think would substantially impair the readability of code
samples.
HTML [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46248859
HTML [2]: https://www.evertype.com/standards/csur/
HTML [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Use_Areas
HTML [4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46277275
california-og wrote 12 hours 9 min ago:
Unscii is great! A few years ago I made a simple mobile-friendly Unscii
art editor:
HTML [1]: http://unicode-drawing-club.netlify.app/
slmjkdbtl wrote 14 hours 14 min ago:
Viznut also made a audio / visual live coding tool IBNIZ, used it for a
performance once it's fire
HTML [1]: http://viznut.fi/ibniz/
imiric wrote 10 hours 57 min ago:
I love this so much.
I'm envious of the level of nerdiness and genius at display, and hope
some of it rubbed off on me by watching that demo.
kragen wrote 9 hours 13 min ago:
Download the program and play with it for a while. You can prepare
to learn by watching, but you will only really learn by doing and
teaching.
kragen wrote 10 hours 58 min ago:
Viznut has made a shitload of amazing things:
HTML [1]: https://www.pouet.net/user.php?who=2547
thiago_fm wrote 14 hours 52 min ago:
Can't wait until somebody makes a game hit in Steam using unscii as
every UI in the game.
hypercube33 wrote 16 hours 17 min ago:
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.
pmarreck wrote 16 hours 20 min ago:
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: [1] 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.)
HTML [1]: https://github.com/pmarreck/printable-binary
mghackerlady wrote 16 hours 50 min ago:
This is conveniently timed, I was planning on doing a cool retro-y
WindowMaker rice over christmas break. Better than Liberation Sans
jaffa2 wrote 18 hours 4 min ago:
Reminds me of UDG graphics on the sinclair spectrum. I like the
example of the image in the article very cool art.
susam wrote 18 hours 25 min ago:
Slightly off-topic but related.
See also: The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack from VileR at < [1] >.
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!
HTML [1]: https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/
Gormo wrote 18 hours 3 min ago:
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.
boxed wrote 18 hours 40 min ago:
That ' is tilted kinda ruins it for me as a programming font, but
otherwise looks really nice.
jhoechtl wrote 18 hours 52 min ago:
With sixel support finally comming to terminals [1] we are full circle,
40 year later.
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixel
kragen wrote 10 hours 50 min ago:
Sixel support unfortunately came to terminals in 01988, as that page
explains. I saw it myself in 01992. Sending uncompressed color
raster data over a 9600-baud serial link again every time you wanted
to look at it was a terrible idea, made worse by the stupid Sixel
encoding inflating it by an additional 33%.
Today, when we're sending it to terminal emulators running on
teraflops supercomputers over gigabit-per-second links, it's only a
waste of CPU and software complexity instead of user time and
precious bandwidth. But it's still a waste.
Why couldn't we have FTP and Gopher support in web browsers instead?
nineteen999 wrote 9 hours 28 min ago:
> Why couldn't we have FTP and Gopher support in web browsers
instead?
I mean not really, they are ancient and horribly insecure protocols
without enough users to justify improving them.
kragen wrote 9 hours 16 min ago:
I don't think they needed improving in order to continue
accessing the existing sites that still used them.
Also, you may not have noticed this, but you're commenting on a
thread that's largely about PETSCII and Videotex.
Fortunately, AFAIK, there isn't any significant body of existing
Sixel art we need to preserve access to.
nineteen999 wrote 5 hours 19 min ago:
> I don't think they needed improving in order to continue
accessing the existing sites that still used them
The browser support would have need continous security fixes
and rewrites unfortunately, the protocol specs and the code was
written in the day and age of a much less adversarial internet.
It's much safer to handle those sort of protocols with a HTTPS
proxy on the front these days. There's dedicated gopher and ftp
clients still out there, IMHO browsers are too big and bloated
as they are they need more stuff taken out of them, not more
added without taking anything away, particularly stuff thats
old and insecure and not used much anymore.
And yes, I'm also here for the retro factor :-) my pet project
is Z80/6502 emulation in UnrealEngine with VT100 and VGA
support and running BBS's in space.
So I'm all over stuff about old ANSI, PETSCII and anything even
tangentially 8x8 character set related: [1]
HTML [1]: https://i.imgur.com/rIY1he8.png
HTML [2]: https://i.imgur.com/DlftREp.png
proof_by_vibes wrote 19 hours 10 min ago:
This is perfect. I'm currently creating a MUD and these are exactly the
kind of fonts I want. Thanks for sharing!
Levitating wrote 5 hours 20 min ago:
I was personally looking for a bitmap font that resembled old fantasy
games for use in a kernel. I was able to write a compile time
constant parser for the .hex file format used here.
Do you have a link to the MUD you're working on?
neuroelectron wrote 19 hours 24 min ago:
This would probably work great with the monospace web framework.
HTML [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41370020
LoganDark wrote 20 hours 28 min ago:
Oh hey, this is the font used by the Minecraft mod OpenComputers.
gothicbluebird wrote 20 hours 35 min ago:
looks very useful. And skillful! Very careful typographic reasoning
when creating the glyphs from the classic originals.
otikik wrote 21 hours 45 min ago:
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.
HTML [1]: https://www.nerdfonts.com
krackout wrote 16 hours 7 min ago:
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-R
egular.ttf
At least the result is perfect!
anthk wrote 16 hours 44 min ago:
Nerdfont sucks as it's non-standard.
otikik wrote 16 hours 20 min ago:
Why is that important?
anthk wrote 15 hours 52 min ago:
It deviates from the Unicode standard. It's doomed to fail.
Ycros wrote 13 hours 32 min ago:
there's enough support for it across various things that it's
not going anywhere
anthk wrote 10 hours 26 min ago:
They said the same about ISO-8859-* encodings,
Webdings/Windings fonts under Windows. Gone. Forever.
kragen wrote 9 hours 8 min ago:
Wingdings is available in OTF format to put on your web
site as a webfont: [1] So is Webdings: [2] Webdings even
got integrated into Unicode 7.0, so all the Noto fonts
support it: [3] And recode(1) has full support for
ISO-8859-*. As does iconv and the Python3 encodings.codecs
module. I'm pretty sure browsers can render pages in them,
too. Firefox keeps rendering UTF-8 pages as if they were
ISO-8859-1 encoded when I screw up at setting the charset
parameter on their content-type.
HTML [1]: https://www.onlinewebfonts.com/fonts/wingdings_OTF
HTML [2]: https://www.dafontfree.io/webdings-font/
HTML [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webdings
anthk wrote 8 hours 1 min ago:
>Webdings even got integrated into Unicode 7.0,
That's the point. Think again.
kragen wrote 7 hours 46 min ago:
It seems incompatible with the idea that it's "Gone.
Forever." Thinking again doesn't change that for me.
The only thing that's gone is the exclusivity to a
single proprietary-software vendor.
otikik wrote 15 hours 44 min ago:
Everything in life is temporary. If it lasts while I use it,
it's as good to me as if it lasts forever.
anthk wrote 14 hours 10 min ago:
ASCII and Unicode will outlast us. Not the case with Nerd
fonts.
kragen wrote 10 hours 47 min ago:
Hopefully the people after us will spend some time enjoying
the things we have left to them; if they dedicate all their
time to creating things that will outlast them, all our
efforts will have been wasted.
otikik wrote 17 hours 40 min ago:
HTML [1]: https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts/issues/1959
zimpenfish wrote 16 hours 19 min ago:
Thanks for filing that. I was slightly confused by the appearance
of the red race car.
imiric wrote 22 hours 56 min ago:
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!
gothicbluebird wrote 20 hours 22 min ago:
could also suit Termux (Android linux terminal) well. Will try it
asap
iberator wrote 17 hours 16 min ago:
How to install it?
01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote 23 hours 33 min ago:
> 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!
IAmBroom wrote 16 hours 58 min ago:
Are you on dialup? :D
mghackerlady wrote 16 hours 49 min ago:
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
anthk wrote 14 hours 9 min ago:
Or with gopher with gopher://magical.fish and
gopher://hngopher.com
Also: [1] [2]
HTML [1]: https://farside.link
HTML [2]: https://lite.cnn.com
HTML [3]: https://text.npr.org
hamaqueto wrote 16 hours 58 min ago:
Thank God!
You saved me.
I won't have to wait seconds (!!!) to read it
inanutshellus wrote 16 hours 21 min ago:
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.
DIR <- back to front page