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OpenBSD: New console font Spleen made default
- dijit 8y agoI'm sad that nobody added a picture of how it actually looks. I believe this is the relevant font: https://www.cambus.net/spleen-monospaced-bitmap-fonts/ https://www.cambus.net/spleen-monospaced-bitmap-fonts/ edit: I'm very stupid and apparently missed the link to this same blog post in TFA. Leaving this here in case someone else makes the same mistake.
- sgt 8y agoI am not sure if this looks terrible or brilliant.
- throwaway2048 8y agowell it certainly looks better than the old one https://i.imgur.com/VqBzIWn.png https://i.imgur.com/VqBzIWn.png It is the old Sun console font taken originally from OpenFirmware.
- akie 8y agoThey went from a terrible font to a bad font. There are so many nice ones [e.g. have a look at https://wesbos.com/programming-fonts/ https://wesbos.com/programming-fonts/], why not pick one of these? Inconsolata or Menlo would be a big improvement over what they chose now. Missed opportunity, IMHO.
- jachee 8y agoThe console font is required to be a bitmapped font.
- mark-r 8y agoNo reason you couldn't render a scalable font at a particular size to make a bitmapped version.
- jolux 8y agoSeveral of those have proprietary licenses. Menlo is a (afaik proprietary) Apple product derived from Bitstream’s Vera Sans Mono and included with all Macs, Consolas was done by Luc de Groot for Microsoft Windows Vista and Office 2007, etc.
- akie 8y agoTrue, that's why I mentioned Inconsolata, which is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, which "is considered free by the Free Software Foundation" and the Debian Project. Not sure what OpenBSD's position on that license is though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIL_Open_Font_License https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIL_Open_Font_License
- throwaway2048 8y agoIts a copyleft license, so unlikely for OpenBSD to be a fan of it. OpenBSD prefers things that are ISC/2 Clause BSD/equivalent license.
- mark-r 8y agoIs there a common font license that would conform?
- moftz 8y agoSource Code Pro, my favorite, is also under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.
- toyg 8y agoOpenBSD people are most certainly not FSF or Debian fans...
- aasasd 8y agoIs that... a serif font? How in the heck? Why? Though I gotta say, the variable stroke width might be less monotone and taxing on the eyes.
- moftz 8y agoThe Sun font was monospaced but just had serifs. Overall pretty terrible to stare at and very 90s.
- pdw 8y agoThe Go Mono font is a modern iteration of that concept. I love it. https://blog.golang.org/go-fonts https://blog.golang.org/go-fonts
- aasasd 8y agoThose are vector fonts. We're discussing bitmap fonts instead. Nothing surprising about vector serif monospace fonts, since Courier and variations―which likely constitute way over 50% of all use of monospaced fonts―are slab-serif fonts.
- ComputerGuru 8y ago> The font family, called Go (naturally) Meaning another search nightmare and all discussions about this font will need to be tagged "gofont" or similar. Oh well. The gofont used for the body of that article is very reminiscent of Candara (or is it Nyala?). The monospaced font is surprisingly nice, though!
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- openloop 8y agoAgree. Real artists ship.
- asveikau 8y agoYou say that, but to me that image evokes more than a decade of seeing machines boot up. Warm feelings.
- atoav 8y agoI had typography as a subject in school and I would say this font is distinctive, but unlike many distinctive fonts it seems to reach it's distinctiveness not on the cost of readability. I program myself and I know that terminal fonts have special requirements (e.g. certain characters like 1 and l or O and 0 should be visual distinctive) which this font certainly does reach. Other than that it is a question of taste.
- pmarin 8y ago>I program myself and I know that terminal fonts have special requirements (e.g. certain characters like 1 and l or O and 0 should be visual distinctive) which this font certainly does reach. They also have fixed width and height constrains. In the case of this font the original motivation was to be readable on a LCD panel at 5x8
- mark-r 8y agoThe square upper-right corner of the "e" is an unusual feature that doesn't seem to harm legibility. I prefer the convention of using a narrow zero to the slashed one in this font though, for exactly this reason.
- jimbo1qaz 8y agoI think I've seen this font before on HN, and I still think B and 8 are too similar (the 8 is quite blocky and only differs in the left corner pixels).
- nailer 8y agoAdmittedly, the link text in TFA is 'website'. Not 'spleen font' or something descriptive.
- passthejoe 8y agohttps://www.cambus.net/spleen-monospaced-bitmap-fonts/ https://www.cambus.net/spleen-monospaced-bitmap-fonts/
- warpech 8y agoFont source with screenshots: https://github.com/fcambus/spleen https://github.com/fcambus/spleen
- heywire 8y agoNice, this might give me the push I need to try BSD on my Dell Latitude 7370 (the XPS 13's cousin). The 3200x1800 display can be a bit hard to read with a default console font. Not that I spend a whole lot of time in the console outside of a terminal emulator, but it is still fun :)
- devereaux 8y agoWay faster is to use a proper font on Linux: setfont ter-132n You can then set it as the default font for all your terminals if you like it. If terminus is not provided by your distribution, get it from http://sourceforge.net/projects/terminus-font/files/terminus-font-4.46/terminus-font-4.46.tar.gz/download http://sourceforge.net/projects/terminus-font/files/terminus... then ./configure etc. as usual. In the end, you just need to keep the matching psf file that you can then move along your other console fonts.
- heywire 8y agoI feel like I tried this on Arch but it was still too small. I ended up using either the sun font or one of the cyr ones, can't remember. I've since moved back to KDE Neon on that machine, so I can't say for sure. I might pop in a USB stick and give it another go...
- taborj 8y agoWhile I'm a huge fan of OpenBSD, you can actually just run this font on your current distro: https://github.com/fcambus/spleen https://github.com/fcambus/spleen
- heywire 8y agoI did notice that, and even available in AUR for Arch. I just wasn't sure if their console font format was compatible with "setfont". Looks like I've got some playing to do (although I'd still like an excuse to give OpenBSD a try :))
- h1d 8y agoIf you want to try BSD, you might as well try FreeBSD and save a few headaches. I tried to mimic my Linux shell environment to OpenBSD a few months ago and after a few days, I gave up and used FreeBSD and pretty much accomplished it. I personally like OpenBSD but the manpower isn't on par with FreeBSD to smooth out the edges I think.
- pavlov 8y agoThe text sample on the author's site[1] is from Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris, so we can deduce the font's name also refers not to the organ but the other meaning of the word "spleen": "Melancholy with no apparent cause, characterised by a disgust with everything." [1] https://www.cambus.net/spleen-monospaced-bitmap-fonts/ https://www.cambus.net/spleen-monospaced-bitmap-fonts/
- aargh_aargh 8y agoAm I the only one who finds fonts with thin lines unreadable for longer periods of time? My eyesight is perfect, yet every time I run across one of these I switch fonts or at least zoom in until the line width seemingly doubles.
- fortyseven 8y agoSame here. I need a bit of thickness. Not necessarily bold, but meat on the pixel bones.
- Synaesthesia 8y agoIt’s because of astigmatism which all people have, to a degree, meaning you have a different focal point for horizontal and vertical lines. I also much prefer large text, even though my vision is pretty good.
- ainar-g 8y agoThis is an unpopular choice, but I have recently switched all my terminals to the Go Fonts[1], and I couldn't be happier. Those who say that only sans-serif fonts belong in a terminal have been lying to me this whole time. [1] https://blog.golang.org/go-fonts https://blog.golang.org/go-fonts
- 1_player 8y agoHey, I'm another fan of serifs in monospaced fonts! Go Fonts reminds me of the Luxi Mono font I've used for years on RedHat/Fedora machines. Nowadays I love and only use Iosevka Slab: https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka (3rd and 4th panel in the topmost screenshot)
- zarq 8y agoNot sure if it's my browser, but the dashes in the example are rendered with anti-aliasing below them. That is going to suck after a while, a dash should only have on-off pixels, nothing inbetween.
- mark-r 8y ago
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Torgo 8y agoHow do you make these work in Ubuntu? Tried copying them to /usr/local/share/fonts and running "fc-cache -f -v" it seems to detect them but lxterminal, fontviewer were still unable to find and use them...
- BackwardSpy 8y agoUbuntu has bitmap fonts disabled by default. You can enable them as follows: cd /etc/fonts/conf.d/ sudo rm -rf 70-no-bitmaps.conf && sudo ln -s ../conf.avail/70-yes-bitmaps.conf . sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig The Ubuntu wiki[1] has information about how you can be more specific and only enable a selection of fonts, if you desire. [1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Fonts#Enabling_Bitmapped_Fonts https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Fonts#Enabling_Bitmapped_Fonts
- zapzupnz 8y agoIt's partly my bad eyesight, but the thin lines make the [ brackets ] look as though one's base isn't aligned properly with the other.
- fxfan 8y agoI want to use ttf fonts on my Linux console. Is that possible?
- aasasd 8y agoIt might be, since the console mode still can display graphics, e.g. Tux or the distro logo on boot―afaik it's done via the framebuffer driver. So you'd need to hijack the console mode, draw characters using a TTF-capable library, and output the result to the framebuffer. Haven't heard of anything readymade in this vein, though. The more pertinent question, however, is “why?”, if you could boot at least bare X and xterm instead.
- zokier 8y agokmscon supports text rendering with pango library, I think it has fairly wide font support.
- rleigh 8y agoI'm unaware of tools to directly do this. Many years ago I wrote a tool to load a font with freetype and render it directly to the framebuffer. Would be relatively simple to do the same and dump out a subset as a psf font. Or perhaps even to add this functionality to kbd setfont(8) directly.
- ah- 8y agoI'm slightly disappointed they didn't pick Comic Sans.
- protomyth 8y agoSadly, no one has done a properly licensed, bitmap clone just for OpenBSD console use. It would really make a nice addition to any OpenBSD presentation.
- mark-r 8y agoWith Microsoft recently doing so much with open source lately, you might even get them to donate it.
- cat199 8y agofor those that miss: this is often used in openbsd circles somewhat as a tongue-in-cheek joke
- gbrown_ 8y agoI'm more than slightly disappointed :(
- eukara 8y agoAwesome! The OpenFirmware font didn't work well at all with tmux sessions, causing artifacts due to it not having the characters for borders and other special characters. It seemed quite limited before.
- openloop 8y agoThanks sir.
- koehr 8y agoIf somebody struggles with porting those fonts to their Linux, I just got it running and wrote about it here: https://koehr.tech/use-openbsds-spleen-bitmap-font-in-linux https://koehr.tech/use-openbsds-spleen-bitmap-font-in-linux
- ComputerGuru 8y agoI don't know if the situation has changed since Spleen was first released [0], but I would desperately hope so as it is ridiculous to default in 2019 to a non-internationalized font, without support for even Latin-based Central European characters, let alone non-Latin alphabets. > Another short term goal is to add support for Central European languages, with Polish being the immediate priority. Other than that, looks good and I'm digging the French literary references. [0]: https://www.cambus.net/spleen-monospaced-bitmap-fonts/ https://www.cambus.net/spleen-monospaced-bitmap-fonts/