6 ms·

Unscii – A set of bitmapped Unicode fonts based on classic system fonts

178 points by vanni 10y ago

WorldMaker 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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).
__david__ 10y ago
Hmmm. The page says "VT100: horizontal lines in different Y positions" are non-unicode characters, except those exist: ⎺⎻─⎼⎽
- mjevans 10y ago
  I imagine the terminal font actually had a potential line at each pixel.
- dzdt 10y ago
  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!
vanni 10y ago
(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
twoquestions 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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
- Nzen 10y ago
  It depends upon your chosen medium. For most terminals, you could print ansi escape codes to color sections of the text output. As with any software, there are disjoint sets of coverage. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/287871/print-in-terminal-with-colors-using-python http://stackoverflow.com/questions/287871/print-in-terminal-... On the other hand, I've seen a number of node.js based terminals, that could be used similarly. https://hyper.is/ https://hyper.is/ While the other suggestion for unicode text viewer is fine, I've used font forge to see the rest of some fonts.
makecheck 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      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 10y ago
        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.
vanni 10y ago
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
vanni 10y ago
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.
jxy 10y ago
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, ↑↓.
throwaway161215 10y ago
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.
mixmastamyk 10y ago
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.
endgame 10y ago
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/
userbinator 10y ago
"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
jquast 10y ago
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.
BuuQu9hu 10y ago
Heh, the tarball contains a full copy of the version 1.0 tarball.
ZenPsycho 10y ago
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.

178 points by vanni 10y ago

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 10y ago
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).

__david__ 10y ago

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

mjevans 10y ago
I imagine the terminal font actually had a potential line at each pixel.
dzdt 10y ago
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!

vanni 10y ago

(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

twoquestions 10y ago

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 10y ago
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
Nzen 10y ago
It depends upon your chosen medium. For most terminals, you could print ansi escape codes to color sections of the text output. As with any software, there are disjoint sets of coverage. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/287871/print-in-terminal-with-colors-using-python http://stackoverflow.com/questions/287871/print-in-terminal-... On the other hand, I've seen a number of node.js based terminals, that could be used similarly. https://hyper.is/ https://hyper.is/ While the other suggestion for unicode text viewer is fine, I've used font forge to see the rest of some fonts.

makecheck 10y ago

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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      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.

vanni 10y ago

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

vanni 10y ago

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.

jxy 10y ago

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, ↑↓.

throwaway161215 10y ago

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.

mixmastamyk 10y ago

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.

endgame 10y ago

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/

userbinator 10y ago

"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

jquast 10y ago

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.

BuuQu9hu 10y ago

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

ZenPsycho 10y ago

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.