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Unscii – a bitmapped Unicode font for blocky graphics
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- fireattack 8y agoWhat does "Unicode" mean in "Unicode font"? From what I can see it only has a handful (ascii?) characters. Edit: after some testing it seems that "unscii-16-full" is the one (and only one?) that supports some Chinese characters, but it's unusable because glyphs stack on each other.. (screenshot: https://files.catbox.moe/262742.png https://files.catbox.moe/262742.png )
- thristian 8y agoIt means that it supports characters outside the basic 127 ASCII or 256 ISO-8859-1 characters, like the Box Drawing[1] and Block Elements[2] characters defined in Unicode. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_Drawing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_Drawing [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_Drawing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_Drawing
- yesenadam 8y ago[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_Elements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_Elements
- fireattack 8y agoBut it's still very far away from "Unicode". From my understanding you should at least have majority of Unicode glyphs to claim so. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_Unicode_typefaces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_Unicode_typefaces
- JdeBP 8y agoI suspect that you are blaming the wrong font for that, because I suspect that the kanji/hanja/hanzi glyphs in question come from GNU Unifont. I myself overlay K16-1990 over GNU Unifont for better-appearing characters. * http://jdebp.eu./Softwares/nosh/user-vt-screenshots.html#Unicode http://jdebp.eu./Softwares/nosh/user-vt-screenshots.html#Uni...
- fireattack 8y agoYour link shows it should be able to display these Chinese characters correctly though. The TTF file I downloaded from this website cannot.
- JdeBP 8y agoThe image shows K16-1990 overlaid upon GNU Unifont, precisely because the former has better glyphs than the latter (had at the time). It does not show that Unscii should be able to do this at all.
- emersonrsantos 8y agoThis is beautiful and heart-warming. Thank you. I use for terminal the classic IBM mainframe 3270 font [1], but I can replace that in a heartbeat with Unscii, which is more uniform and less OCR-y. [1] https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font
- lubujackson 8y agoIt's a little confusing, but my read is that this is a generalized set of old font characters that were used for graphics (like code 437) plus a bunch of unicode symbols that are also useful for graphics. With the idea being you could make much more intricate art from this font set. I think the more interesting idea would be to use it to encode movies similar to how ASCII animations work - I wonder how compressed and good looking a movie might be using this font?
- Klover 8y agoNice approach! Unless I missed something you’d still be having very few colours, a limited resolution, comparatively poor performance to an OpenGL rendered DRM output (as in, also a command line environment), and if you simply use deflate or zstd for your compression you’ll have none of the streaming benefits of h264 or newer. I like your idea though.
- PavlovsCat 8y agoI don't know if MPlayer can already take arbitrary fonts into account for playing movies back in the terminal, but it's open source, so it probably could be expanded in that way: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/screen.html http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/screen.html
- _arvin 8y agoWell, I'm ecstatic. What a beautiful font. After seeing this, I was finally inspired to find out why BitchX wouldn't display ANSI art correctly. Turns out I needed a code 437 emulator! [1] I can now use it the way it was meant to. Here it is paired with unscii-16-full 12pt [2] This isn't nostalgia, this is just _better_. [1] https://github.com/keaston/cp437 https://github.com/keaston/cp437 [2] https://i.imgur.com/3Oj9Vsy.png https://i.imgur.com/3Oj9Vsy.png
- AckSyn 8y agoI hadn't realized it was even maintained still this decade, or the preceding one. It's latest version is 1.2.1 and released on November 14, 2014... Not exactly up-to-date by some standards but I'm glad it's still around.
- masklinn 8y ago> Turns out I needed a code 437 emulator! [1] So that… just converts from cp437 (output by the subprocess) to whatever the "system encoding" (assumed to be the terminal's) is? I'm surprised iconv or the like doesn't handle that natively. Or is the issue that you still need to interact with the subprocess and iconv(1) only does piping/non-interactive conversions?
- natmaka 8y agoWondering how it may be used along with http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/libcaca http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/libcaca
- Tempest1981 8y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13185932 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13185932
- kyberias 8y agoIt's a bit unclear why this exists. It seems to combine glyphs from 8-bit computers and place them in Unicode space even though the standard doesn't define many of them. I guess the reason is to be able to combine them in some "art". Perhaps those missing code points could be added by the Consortium based on this feedback.
- Sharlin 8y ago> some ”art” Eh, text art is a venerable art form as old as teletypes.
- reaperducer 8y agoOlder than that, even. It goes back at least to typewriter days. The women in the typing pools of large companies would make these and post them on the pin boards. Imagine the kind of abstract thinking it took to do ASCII art with no delete key!
- Annatar 8y agoIf the terms "PETSCII", "Amiga ASCII" and "ANSI art" do not mean anything to you, then this font and what can be rendered with it will be completely meaningless to you and you will be confused like you are. You had to have experienced it to appreciate it, which you do not apoear to have. A shame, really, since you missed out on a lot of cool art.
- diaz 8y agoI think for many people this here doesn't mean anything. I'm having a really hard time understanding what is going on in the comments and on the post itself and I've just settled with "it's something about ascii art on terminals" and that's it. Probably has uses. But don't dismiss the confusion on lots of people since this appears to be target at older folks.
- Annatar 8y agoOne can render ASCII art or even "poor man's graphics" in any text editor regardless of their age. Yes it's dated, but if one is working anywhere near physical equipmet like terminal concentrators hooked up to servers' serial ports, one quickly learns to appreciate graphic approximations of windows with just ASCII characters. The rest like Amiga ASCII art from Skid Row and PaRaDoX and the like... you missed out. It was a glorious childhood. It's hard to relate just how great it was owning a Commodore Amiga computer. The ASCII art in front of cracked games from the group who cracked them belong with that experience, and back in the day, it was mind-blowing. This font is a modern implementation of characters enabling that kind of art again, on modern systems, in programs like OpenOffice for example. And the target is the cracking / demo scene, irrespective of age.
- dancek 8y agoWow, pelulamu.net still exists! I remember a friend talking about it about 20 years ago, i.e. when we were in school. The font looks nice and is probably strictly an improvement over most terminal fonts of the same size. I just wish they had a 24 or even 32px size for the hidpi displays we have these days. I wonder if it's easy to run a linux console font in double size.
- Sharlin 8y ago> Wow, pelulamu.net still exists! Yeah, it’s a site maintained by viznut, a well-known Finnish demoscene figure and digital activist.
- kristopolous 8y agoI had an adjacent project about 6 years ago which included a Unicode drawing program, text engine and image converter (https://github.com/kristopolous/unifig https://github.com/kristopolous/unifig) ... I think the mirror I have at http://9ol.es/blocky/ http://9ol.es/blocky/ is still functional. Edit, no it's not... I can bring it up to functional if people request. I spent a decent amount of time on it, nobody paid any attention though. Oh well, not everything's a winner.
- djmips 8y agoHey, I think it's cool. Would like to try.
- 127 8y agoI did similar exploration of generating PETSCII from images recently on a Jupyter notebook: https://github.com/amb/Image-to-PETSCII/blob/master/Picture%20to%20PETSCII.ipynb https://github.com/amb/Image-to-PETSCII/blob/master/Picture%... No colors though. Might have to continue the project as the colors look really nice on the examples.
- curlypaul924 8y agoReminds me of: http://www.inp.nsk.su/~bolkhov/files/fonts/univga/index.html http://www.inp.nsk.su/~bolkhov/files/fonts/univga/index.html though this one is based on Fixedsys instead of VGA. I used VGA16 for years, until LCDs, subpixel rendering, and Unicode programming fonts became ubiquitous.
- VadimPR 8y agoOh cool! I'm a Mudlet dev (https://github.com/Mudlet/Mudlet https://github.com/Mudlet/Mudlet) - the font looks pretty nice. Not that many MUDs out there that make use of unicode graphics though.
- dukoid 8y agoIt's a bit sad that many of the ETSI EN 300 706 V1.2.1 graphics characters (1, section 15.7.2) are not available in Unicode. I am maintaining a small program that renders images directly in the terminal using unicode block graphics characters (2), and these would come really handy to enhance the conversion... 1) https://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_en/300700_300799/300706/01.02.01_60/en_300706v010201p.pdf https://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_en/300700_300799/300706/01... 2) https://github.com/stefanhaustein/TerminalImageViewer https://github.com/stefanhaustein/TerminalImageViewer
- girst 8y agoThere is a proposal to add them to Unicode, but the process takes a while (and its the third proposal since 2017): https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2018/18275r-terminals-prop-no-attachments.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2018/18275r-terminals-prop-no-at...
- dukoid 8y agoLooks great! Do you know why the other two have failed? I was initially wondering whether it makes sense to bundle legacy and teletext all together into one "big" proposal, but then I realized that there is a very high amount of overlap...
- girst 8y agowell, the three proposals are from the same group of people. they probably are reactions to feedback from the unicode technical commitee[0]. I've looked into the utc meeting notes, but those don't really contain much info[1]. [0]: see the progression at https://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetMatchingDocs.pl?L2/18-275R https://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetMatchingDocs.pl?L2/18-275... and https://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetMatchingDocs.pl?L2/18-235 https://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetMatchingDocs.pl?L2/18-235 and https://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetMatchingDocs.pl?L2/17-435 https://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetMatchingDocs.pl?L2/17-435 [1]: https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2018/18007.htm https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2018/18007.htm and https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2018/18272.htm https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2018/18272.htm and https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2018/18115.htm https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2018/18115.htm
- Annatar 8y agoz!OMG it supports Amiga ASCII and C= PETSCII!1!11!!, instead of being yet another PC-tin-bucket-MS-DOS-only font. Now we can enjoy all that wonderful Amiga Type ASCII art in front of Skid Row cracked games! Well done! Well done! (Loading Star Control.)
- Sharlin 8y agoThe author, viznut, is an olskool demoscener and specifically interested in extreme low-end and vintage computing.
- masswerk 8y agoAs some kind of a parallel project, I once wrote a library for transforming Unicode text to 8-bit character patterns. (The goal was a bit different, as it was meant to render about any text which might be found to a canvas implementing a 8-bit terminal emulation. The glyphs were mostly based on PET character sets.) https://www.masswerk.at/char8/ https://www.masswerk.at/char8/ Here's a rendering sample: https://www.masswerk.at/char8/samples/char8js-sample-green.html https://www.masswerk.at/char8/samples/char8js-sample-green.h...
- christianvozar 8y agoThe ansi art scene is still kicking it. http://blocktronics.org http://blocktronics.org
- sjs382 8y agoAlso https://artpacks.org https://artpacks.org
- Domark 8y agoThe BBS ANSI scene was fun, but then we moved to Photoshop. Now it’s fun to work with Retina level graphics! And the tools now... I love Lightwave. So it’s always been peculiar that some are attached to this particular style. Then I noticed a bit of it is quite explicit or just nasty, and the art style complements the restricted artistic method ANSI provides. Also since I associate it with my youth, it just seems so immature. That’s obviously my personal bias.
- m00nki 8y agoand a very recent newcomer, https://mircart.org/ https://mircart.org/ !
- itukeitto 8y agoI also recommend checking out glyphdrawing.club for a contemporary web-based editor using inventive unscii fonts. It features an original font and some contributor-submitted ones! Really fun to play with. https://glyphdrawing.club https://glyphdrawing.club https://github.com/hlotvonen/glyph-drawing-club https://github.com/hlotvonen/glyph-drawing-club https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/glyph-drawing-club-editing-tool-heiki-lotvonen-ian-tuomi-digital-251018 https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/glyph-drawing-club-edit...
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- mixmastamyk 8y ago> Mattel Aquarius: Holy cow, thinking of George Plimpton and the computer I'll never have. This person did their homework.