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BigBlueTerminal

README.md

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            An oldschool fixed-width pixel font / v1.00


                     1.  What's this?
                     2.  Contents
                     3.  Sizes & display
                     4.  Formats & encodings
                     5.  'Plus' version notes
                     6.  Bonus DOS stuff
                     7.  Credits & acknowledgements
                     8.  Contact
                     9.  Legal stuff

  1. WHAT'S THIS? ===============

    BigBlue Terminal is a monospaced pixel font, designed for use in fixed- width textual environments (consoles/terminals, text/code/hex editors and so on). It follows the metrics and dimensions of Windows' old Terminal font (at the 9pt/12px size), but the appearance is closer to the classic IBM PC text mode character sets.

    At 8x12 pixels, Terminal is nicely compact and useful, but also kind of ugly. Instead, BigBlue Terminal is closely based on IBM's 8x14 EGA/VGA charset -- I just like it better. Basically, that font has been squeezed and modified to fit into a 8x12-pixel cell. For the extended 'Plus' version, many additional Unicode characters have been added to support international scripts and symbol sets.

  1. CONTENTS ===========

    BigBlue_TerminalPlus.TTF BigBlue TerminalPlus TrueType font Multi-language Unicode character set

    BigBlue_Terminal_437TT.TTF BigBlue Terminal 437TT TrueType font Codepage 437 (DOS/OEM-US) mapped to Unicode

    Bigblue_Terminal_437BM.FON BigBlue Terminal 437BM Windows bitmap format Code page 437 (DOS/OEM-US)

    BLUETERM.F12 Raw bitmap font data

    BLUETERM.COM TSR font loader for DOS/VGA

    README.TXT This file

    LICENSE.TXT CC-BY-SA 4.0 license terms

  1. SIZES & DISPLAY ==================

3.1. Pixel and point sizes

The native font size is 8x12. Since this is a pixel font, it'll look best at a size of 12 pixels (or integer multiples of 12), whether you're using the bitmap or TrueType versions. Otherwise you will get fugly artifacted scaling.

On Windows, this translate to 9 pt (at the default screen density of 96 PPI); on Mac, you'll want 12 pt (72 PPI). Do the math for other screen densities. On newfangled super-high-PPI displays, scaling artifacts become less apparent, so you may be able to get away with arbitrary sizes.

3.2. Rendering

Current operating systems usually have subpixel anti-aliasing enabled by default: ClearType on Windows, FreeType on Linux, Core Text on Mac OS X. This is less than ideal for TrueType pixel fonts, since it may introduce a sort of "color fringing" effect in some cases.

In practice I don't find it that noticeable, but it bothers you, you can get rid of it. On Windows, turn ClearType off or use the bitmap (.FON) version. On Linux, there are ways to disable anti-aliasing for specific fonts with FreeType. You'll have to see your docs/the web on how to pull that off though.

  1. FORMATS & ENCODINGS ======================

4.1. BigBlue Terminal 437TT (TrueType, CP437 charset)

This version features the Codepage 437 character set (DOS/OEM-US). Since any TrueType font can (and should) include a Unicode character map, this is still a Unicode font, and has multi-platform support as such.

CP437 can be problematic to map to Unicode, due to characters 00h-1Fh and 7Fh: they can be interpreted either as control codes, or as graphical symbols. Thus there are two 'canonical' Unicode maps for CP437, and software that expects one of them may not play nice with the other one.

This font covers both bases in the same mapping: the problem characters are duplicated so that your program will find them at either placement. Windows detects the font as an "OEM/DOS" one, and you can use it in any program/environment that understands this charset (including the Command Prompt). The same will be true on other platforms, as long as your software is properly configured -- RTFM, GIYF, etc.

4.2. BigBlue TerminalPlus (TrueType, extended charset)

This is more of a "Unicode font" as most people grok the term. On top of the CP437 range, this version supports extended Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Hebrew scripts plus a bunch of additional glyphs and Unicode symbols.

There are 782 characters in total (more than the Windows Glyph List 4 -- in fact the entire WGL4 range is there). Some were based on various international codepages, others were drawn entirely by hand to match the visual style. A handful of the cp437 characters had to be remapped (see the next section), but they're all still around as well.

4.3. BigBlue Terminal 437BM (Windows bitmap, CP437 charset)

A straight bitmap version of the DOS/CP437 charset. This may still be more useful than 437TT in certain situations:

  • You don't need to modify the registry to use it in the Command Prompt (or any console window).

  • .FON isn't Unicode, so this version can force the CP437 encoding on programs like Notepad, which insist on failing miserably otherwise.

  • Bitmap fonts aren't subject to ClearType subpixel anti-aliasing.

  1. 'PLUS' VERSION CHARACTER MAP NOTES =====================================

    If you care about this sort of thing, you can use your favorite font viewer to see the full character range. Windows has charmap.exe (I like SIL ViewGlyph better), OS X has Font Book, etc. A few things that may be of interest about the expanded 'Plus' character mapping:

    • Alternate number forms: there's a flat-top "3" mapped to U+01B7 ('Latin capital letter Ezh'), which is more easily distinguished from the Cyrillic letter Ze. Also, two alternative zeroes (dotted and slashed) are mapped to U+2299 ('circled dot operator') and U+2300 ('diameter symbol') respectively.

    • Cursor shapes: Unicode character U+2581 ('lower one eight block') can be used to mimic the classic text-mode cursor appearance. U+2584 ('lower half block') and U+2588 ('full block') could also stand in for those respective cursor forms, too.

    • The 'Plus' version includes a full Greek alphabet, which takes over the code points that Unicode assigns to the Greek/Math characters from DOS codepage 437. Instead of just dropping the CP437 originals, I tried to preserve them at remapped code points that make some sense. Here's what's changed:

      CP437 Canonical mapping from Modified 'Plus' mapping Char CP437 to Unicode from CP437 to Unicode

      à (E0h) U+03B1 'Greek small Alpha' U+0251 'Latin small Alpha' á (E1h) U+00DF 'Latin small Sharp S' U+03D0 'Greek Beta symbol' â (E2h) U+0393 'Greek capital Gamma' U+1D26 'Small capital Gamma' ã (E3h) U+03C0 'Greek small Pi' U+1D28 'Small capital Pi' ä (E4h) U+03A3 'Greek capital Sigma' U+2211 'N-ary Summation' å (E5h) U+03C3 'Greek small Sigma' U+01A1 'Small o with horn' ç (E7h) U+03C4 'Greek small Tau' U+1D1B 'Small capital T' è (E8h) U+03A6 'Greek capital Phi' U+0278 'Latin small Phi' é (E9h) U+0398 'Greek capital Theta' U+03F4 'Capital Theta symbol' ê (EAh) U+03A9 'Greek capital Omega' U+2126 'Ohm symbol' ë (EBh) U+03B4 'Greek small Delta' U+1E9F 'Latin small Delta' í (EDh) U+03C6 'Greek small Phi' U+2205 'Empty set' î (EEh) U+03B5 'Greek small Epsilon' U+2208 'Element of'

  1. BONUS DOS STUFF ==================

    Yes, you can get BigBlue Terminal working in actual DOS too, because you are just THAT oldschool! The following files will let you do that on any VGA-compatible DOS machine (or in DOSBox, PCEm and so on).

    • BLUETERM.COM: a TSR program (courtesy of ripsaw8080) that gives you a 640x480 text mode with the 8x12 font -- 80 rows by 40 columns. It persists across mode changes, and I find it nice to use in DOSBox, since 640x480 is a square-pixel resolution and doesn't get mangled by aspect correction.

    • BLUETERM.F12: the raw bitmap font data, usable with any font-loading program such as Yossi Gil's LOADFONT (from the widespread FNTCOL16 archive). You'll typically get the standard 400-line text mode, and with a 12-scanline font this gives you 33 rows of text.

  1. CREDITS & ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS =============================

    • Fonts, documentation and ASCII logo by VileR.

    THANKS TO:

    • ripsaw8080, for providing the code for the TSR DOS version (and for granting permission to include it here)

    • Rebecca G. Bettencourt/Kreative Korp, for responding to my inquiries with a surprise open-source release of the awesome Bits'n'Picas bitmap- to-outline converter

    TOOLS USED:

  1. CONTACT ==========

    I can be reached at: email - viler -AT- int10h -DOT- org www - http://int10h.org blog - http://8088mph.blogspot.com

    Spam and/or excessive dumbness will be ignored, deleted, spindled and mutilated.

  1. LEGAL STUFF ==============

    BigBlue Terminal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

    You should have received a copy of the license along with this work. If not, see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/.

                                                           (c) 2015 VileR

Which font?

TL;DR

  • Pick your font family:
    • If you are limited to monospaced fonts (because of your terminal, etc) then pick a font with Nerd Font Mono (or NFM).
    • If you want to have bigger icons (usually around 1.5 normal letters wide) pick a font without Mono i.e. Nerd Font (or NF). Most terminals support this, but ymmv.
    • If you work in a proportional context (GUI elements or edit a presentation etc) pick a font with Nerd Font Propo (or NFP).

Ligatures

Ligatures are generally preserved in the patched fonts. Nerd Fonts v2.0.0 had no ligatures in the Nerd Font Mono fonts, this has been dropped with v2.1.0. If you have a ligature-aware terminal and don't want ligatures you can (usually) disable them in the terminal settings.

Explanation

Once you narrow down your font choice of family (Droid Sans, Inconsolata, etc) and style (bold, italic, etc) you have 2 main choices:

Option 1: Download already patched font

  • For a stable version download a font package from the release page
  • Or download the development version from the folders here

Option 2: Patch your own font

  • Patch your own variations with the various options provided by the font patcher (i.e. not include all symbols for smaller font size)

For more information see: The FAQ