15 ms·

3270font: A Font for the Nostalgic

184 points by lelf 6y ago

YZF 6y ago
Maybe it's just me but it doesn't quite look like what I remember 327X terminals looking...
- macjohnmcc 6y ago
  And without the incredibly loud noise when typing on those terminals it will never be close!
  - m463 6y ago
    compared to an 029?
  - protomyth 6y ago
    Gotta admit I could fly on those model F keyboards but that thing was noisy especially at 3 in the morning.
  - rbanffy 6y ago
    I must confess I miss the 110 baud cadenced hum (and typing) of the ASR-33 teletypes. Wish I could have one.
    - Alex63 6y ago
      If serious, I'm wondering if you were in the Canadian Armed Forces reserves when I was (early 80s). We were still using 33s. Remember the 'chadless' tapes? Good times. But dusty.
      - rbanffy 6y ago
        No. First time I met a 33 it was already quite obsolete. It was used as a terminal and paper tape drive for a CNC emulator that was used for teaching.
  - C1sc0cat 6y ago
    I used to like the v loud VT100 key clicks but a bit distracting for others - not as much noise as a dual head daisy wheel printer or a real line printer
- abraae 6y ago
  I thought the same, but it's been a looong time. I remember the standard setup for a 3279 color terminal was to go through and align the red, blue and green guns at a number of points on the screen. When you had aligned them all, the target dot was white. It was very common to see badly aligned displays (some were hard to align in any case) where the letters had a pinkish shadow effect form misalignment of the guns. Good times.
  - rbanffy 6y ago
    The lowercase "s" is a bit different, but that's because I really dislike the 3279's "s".
    - scionthefly 6y ago
      That is the best font-nerd (positive connotation) statement I'll hear all day.
- kens 6y ago
  I was a bit suspicious, but I looked at an old IBM manual [1, page 23] and the characters match up. Keep in mind though, that the 3270 didn't display lower case, (until later dual-case models), so the examples don't look like the classic 3270. Also, characters were generated from a 7x9 matrix, not the smooth lines in the font. For those not familiar with old IBM systems, I'll point out that the 3270 is not a specific machine, but an "Information Display System", made up of various control units, display stations, and printers. As time went on, different models in the 3270 line appeared such as the color 3279 display with 4 color text, expandable to 7 colors. So there's not the "one true 3270 display". [1] http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/3270/GA27-2749-1_IBM_3270_Information_Display_System_Component_Description_Jun72.pdf http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/3270/GA27-2749-1_IBM_3270_I...
- rbanffy 6y ago
  Author here. The work started by tracing over bitmaps from x3270's fonts, which were originally created by copying pixels from a physical 3278-2 terminal screen. I tried to remain accurate, but allowed significant deviations for accented characters, which, in the originals, had letters vertically compressed to make room for the accent. There are also lots of glyphs that were never in a 3270 terminal.
scrozier 6y ago
At my first real job, the hackers of the day (1980) were figuring out how to draw stuff on 3270 terminals. They (the terminals) were massive beasts with a somehow delicate font.
m463 6y ago
I was wondering how to get emacs to display this. after a maze of twisty passages, all alike: $ sudo apt-get install fonts-3270 $ fc-list | grep 3270 ... 3270Narrow.otf: IBM 3270 Narrow:style=Medium $ emacs ... (set-face-attribute 'default nil :family "IBM 3270 Narrow" :font "Medium" :height 140 :background "black" :foreground "green") voila! for comparison, my normal setup is: (set-face-attribute 'default nil :font "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono" :height 140 :weight 'bold :foreground "black" :background "cornsilk") I would like to see other good setups
- idiocrat 6y ago
  In my Visual Studio I'm using Toshiba Sat 8x14 (CP437, square 1:1) from oldschool pc fonts. For me its the best. https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/#sec2-toshiba https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/#sec2-toshiba
  - reaperducer 6y ago
    I'm still searching for Sperry terminal fonts. Not from the rebadged Leading Edge machines, but from real Sperry terms.
    - idiocrat 6y ago
      Do you have any example? I tried to duck "Sperry Font" images. Found "Cholo Sperry". Is it this? https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Sperry+fonts&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fimgs3.fontbrain.com%2Fimgs%2Fd6%2F87%2F91b9333eb1e35341c26d8029cb95%2Fsa-720x400.png https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Sperry+fonts&iar=images&iax=images... EDIT: Please ignore above, I searched for "Sperry Terminal", and found these. Yes, I remember the fonts from like 30 years ago. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=sperry+terminal&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn8.bigcommerce.com%2Fs-a1x7hg2jgk%2Fimages%2Fstencil%2F1280x1280%2Fproducts%2F594%2F4518%2Fsperry-computer-terminal-t3612-00-svt-1120-22.11__49234.1489914559.jpg%3Fc%3D2%3Fimbypass%3Don https://duckduckgo.com/?q=sperry+terminal&iar=images&iax=ima...
      - 6y ago
t0astbread 6y ago
For some reason this font looks much better to me in the cool-retro-term screenshot compared to the modern terminals but I can't explain why. Does the spacing somehow seem less wide on a CRT monitor?
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  It's the aliasing. Phosphor displays "smooth" out the text whereas we've spend better part of the last 30 years trying to interpolate pixels to achieve the same. See font hinting - it is a rabbit hole. If you've never used a terminal before, one of those CRT amber displays, you're definitely missing out. It's a sight to behold. Not just visually, but also how instantaneous keyboard strokes appear on the screen. It will make you despise the current technology stack, operating systems and pretty much any user interface whilst you've just had the best minute and half of your life pressing keys...with a giant smile on your face. It is experiential thing - the current generation will never know or experience.
  - sbierwagen 6y ago
    I distinctly remember when the local library started phasing in web-based terminals to replace text-based card catalog terminals. Early 2000s, it must have been? Slow as molasses, hard on the eyes, (Remember when every dang institutional CRT would be set to a flickery 60hz, with no way to fix it?) gummy rubber-dome keyboards on Wintel machines, but by god it was web-based, which was the Future. (Oh how right they were...) Anyone with a web browser at home could visit it, without having to bust out telnet! I stuck with the amber screen terminals, whose commands I had long-since memorized, but their numbers steadily dwindled, dwindled, until there was one left, then none. Forced into the arms of an IE6-era old school form-based web app, no shortcuts, no nothing. The data was all still text, they wouldn't have cover photos for years. Alas.
    - systemvoltage 6y ago
      I share your sadness and I emphathize. There are so many things like this that I worry, will be lost in the oblivion of time, and erased forever. I think cliche of romanticizing old ways of doing things is totally uncalled for. People don't romanticize about bad things from the old days. They pick the best ones that survived memories and thus talk about it to provide guidance for the future. We should listen to them.
protomyth 6y ago
Yeah, nostalgia. (Glances over at the S924 machine running IBM i in the server room).
- rbanffy 6y ago
  IBM i would be the 5250 line, IIRC. They used a similar font.
tdeck 6y ago
For those not familiar with the 3270 terminals they're actually kind of interesting and very different from more familiar character-cell terminals. I found this out doing the "master the mainframe" contest years back - it's like a whole other world. Each screen has a set of editable regions (with formatting) and the terminal provides a line editor for those regions, and a way to submit the whole screen's edits to the mainframe. That way a user can fill out a whole form without the computer receiving any interrupts at all.
- rbanffy 6y ago
  Kind of a web browser in the late 60's ;-)
  - p_l 6y ago
    I often use exactly that comparison when describing block terminals to people - you send a page encoded in rather dense markup, and you can use that to implement forms where only user input is returned.
  - freqshow 6y ago
    Long ago when I was first trying to understand how web servers worked, that was my first "light bulb" moment. "Oh...it's CICS but with IP addresses instead of port numbers."
  - app4soft 6y ago
    We may still enjoy Links2[0] browsers in the modern terminals with a 3270font not only on PC, but on Android mobile too![1,2] > $ links2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24647699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24647699 [screenshot] https://i.imgur.com/9quUyEE.png https://i.imgur.com/9quUyEE.png [0] http://links.twibright.com http://links.twibright.com [1] https://repology.org/project/links/versions https://repology.org/project/links/versions [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16191843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16191843
    - rbanffy 6y ago
gorgoiler 6y ago
The history behind this is fascinating. A fun file format for a font would contain not just the foundry but also fields explaining the family tree and design affiliation of the face. Where the design came from. What the influences were. What the goals should be, for any type which is set in the font. Other foundries that have made this typeface before. Do any formats support this rich lore?
txutxu 6y ago
Tag me as a nostalgic (even if never used an IBM terminal, I did arrive to computes as a child at the 286 and DOS times). Have been using the version of this font that comes in the Debian repos like two years ago, but I always turn back to Terminus font. I got in love many years ago with Terminus, when I did configure my thinkpad T41 in a way, that TTY1 and a full screen xterm, did look exactly the same, with the terminus font. They were indistinguishable except for the cursor. I like to try new fonts from time to time, but I always return back to Terminus. I was using 3270 even out of the terminal (for the file manager, GTK apps, fluxbox menus, etc) but at the end I think it did cause visual fatigue. With Terminus doesn't happen to me (same computer, setup, etc, just changing the font).
- rbanffy 6y ago
  > I was using 3270 even out of the terminal (for the file manager, GTK apps, fluxbox menus, etc) but at the end I think it did cause visual fatigue. Oh no! You should not overuse it. I use it only in terminals and source code editors and that's it. It's my signal to "here: this is where you should focus" signal.
  - txutxu 6y ago
    That's true. Currently using fixed type only in the window manager (bars and wm menus) but a sans type font in everything that is not a terminal. Thanks for taking the time to improve this font and publish it with proper build instructions! Good job.
    - rbanffy 6y ago
      Thank you. I love that people get to experience that small piece of computer history.
JdeBP 6y ago
Two things. First: It would be a good idea to note the FreeBSD port as well as the package. In the ports tree, this is x11-fonts/3270font . The path is important. * https://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports/head/x11-fonts/3270font/ https://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports/head/x11-fonts/3270font/ Second: The FreeBSD kernel's "vt" built-in terminal emulator has its own simple font format for Unicode bitmap fonts. It's made from Unifont HEX or BDF files with the vtfontcvt tool. Unfortunately, there's no direct path from any of the output formats here to either of those, nor are they nor the "vtfont" format generated here. This prevents using this font in one obvious place: in the kernel virtual terminal devices themselves. * https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=vtfontcvt&sektion=8 https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=vtfontcvt&sektion=... (My, user-space, terminal emulator takes the same fonts. One thing that it does that the built-in kernel one does not is permit overlaying "vtfont" fonts, where a font file need only define the glyphs specific to itself, and rely upon falling back to an underlying more general font. Having HEX files is very useful for this, as one can easily remove things like duplication of GNU Unifont, which people tend to use as a filler, by manipulating HEX files.) * http://jdebp.uk./Softwares/nosh/guide/terminal-resources.html#fonts http://jdebp.uk./Softwares/nosh/guide/terminal-resources.htm...
- rbanffy 6y ago
  Author here: I don't use FreeBSD myself. Is there something I should change in the README? For the vt console, I'd suggest starting with the bitmap that comes with x3270, which is what I used to trace the vector version.
  - JdeBP 6y ago
    I don't know very much about fontforge, but it seems that you can get it to generate bitmap BDF fonts. One may or may not be able to run vtfontcvt on that, it not being a general purpose BDF-processing tool, but having the BDF is at least something for people to work with. (A Unifont HEX file would be better, but fontforge doesn't seem capable of that from what I can see. And unibdf2hex has some documented limitations.) > On FreeBSD the font can be installed with pkg install 3270font or from x11-fonts/3270font in the ports tree. You could even hyperlink to the port's entry on FreshPorts, https://www.freshports.org/x11-fonts/3270font/ https://www.freshports.org/x11-fonts/3270font/ , although that seems to be having WWW server problems right at this moment. (See https://www.freshports.org/search.php?query=3270font&search=go https://www.freshports.org/search.php?query=3270font&search=... for search results, which are working at the moment, for me at least.) And you are in the AUR at https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/3270-fonts/ https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/3270-fonts/ by the way.
enriquto 6y ago
It's a bit sad to see such a beautiful bitmaps blurred to death by clueless "antialiasing". Doesn't anybody appreciate clean bitmap fonts anymore? I feel like an old man yelling at passerby.
- tenebrisalietum 6y ago
  You can't properly appreciate them unless viewed on a CRT with it's softened edges, visible scan lines, bloom, and glow.
- arexxbifs 6y ago
  Font smoothing in general is pretty bad but in Linux it's abysmal. I use bitmap fonts as much as possible and I turn AA off for all fonts below a certain size (18 px IIRC). I also force Firefox to exclusively use Arial because of the excellent hinting. Things are so much more legible and crisp it's not even funny. (Edit: Funny thing is, I remember font smoothing as much better in general maybe 10-15 years ago. Perhaps it was just the novelty that appealed to me then.)
  - KozmoNau7 6y ago
    I've found the font rendering to be very good indeed ever since the Truetype2 patent expired, so the proper byte-code interpreter could be enabled in Freetype and the autohinter disabled. I find the rendering on Linux (KDE Neon and openSUSE for me) to be vastly superior to Windows 10. It was already very good on my old 27" ~108ppi display, but it's even better now that I have a 4K display that's ~163ppi, which I run at 150% scale. Crisp shapes, no blurring at all. It's all at default settings, subpixel rendering on and slight hinting.
    - gombosg 6y ago
      > the proper byte-code interpreter could be enabled in Freetype and the autohinter disabled Can you point me to some docs about how this can be done?
      - 6y ago
FerretFred 6y ago
Wow! Back to the 80s! Bliss ... Now all I need is the white noise from the computer suite aircon, the shitty fluorescent lighting and to lower the room temperature quite a lot..
TomMasz 6y ago
Oh man, this brings back memories. When I first got started in my career we developed on an IBM 370 and I spent a lot of time on 3270s. Eventually, though, we got our own VAX that we didn't have to share with the rest of the company and never looked back. Still, it took a while to adjust to the early EDT editor.
- Alex63 6y ago
  I don't miss EDT so much, but I wish someone would create an OSS version of EVE/TPU. As a developer, that's one of the things I remember best about moving from RSTS to VMS. That and the "symbolic debugger".

184 points by lelf 6y ago

YZF 6y ago

Maybe it's just me but it doesn't quite look like what I remember 327X terminals looking...

macjohnmcc 6y ago
And without the incredibly loud noise when typing on those terminals it will never be close!
- m463 6y ago
  compared to an 029?
- protomyth 6y ago
  Gotta admit I could fly on those model F keyboards but that thing was noisy especially at 3 in the morning.
- rbanffy 6y ago
  I must confess I miss the 110 baud cadenced hum (and typing) of the ASR-33 teletypes. Wish I could have one.
  - Alex63 6y ago
    If serious, I'm wondering if you were in the Canadian Armed Forces reserves when I was (early 80s). We were still using 33s. Remember the 'chadless' tapes? Good times. But dusty.
    - rbanffy 6y ago
      No. First time I met a 33 it was already quite obsolete. It was used as a terminal and paper tape drive for a CNC emulator that was used for teaching.
- C1sc0cat 6y ago
  I used to like the v loud VT100 key clicks but a bit distracting for others - not as much noise as a dual head daisy wheel printer or a real line printer
abraae 6y ago
I thought the same, but it's been a looong time. I remember the standard setup for a 3279 color terminal was to go through and align the red, blue and green guns at a number of points on the screen. When you had aligned them all, the target dot was white. It was very common to see badly aligned displays (some were hard to align in any case) where the letters had a pinkish shadow effect form misalignment of the guns. Good times.
- rbanffy 6y ago
  The lowercase "s" is a bit different, but that's because I really dislike the 3279's "s".
  - scionthefly 6y ago
    That is the best font-nerd (positive connotation) statement I'll hear all day.
kens 6y ago
I was a bit suspicious, but I looked at an old IBM manual [1, page 23] and the characters match up. Keep in mind though, that the 3270 didn't display lower case, (until later dual-case models), so the examples don't look like the classic 3270. Also, characters were generated from a 7x9 matrix, not the smooth lines in the font. For those not familiar with old IBM systems, I'll point out that the 3270 is not a specific machine, but an "Information Display System", made up of various control units, display stations, and printers. As time went on, different models in the 3270 line appeared such as the color 3279 display with 4 color text, expandable to 7 colors. So there's not the "one true 3270 display". [1] http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/3270/GA27-2749-1_IBM_3270_Information_Display_System_Component_Description_Jun72.pdf http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/3270/GA27-2749-1_IBM_3270_I...
rbanffy 6y ago
Author here. The work started by tracing over bitmaps from x3270's fonts, which were originally created by copying pixels from a physical 3278-2 terminal screen. I tried to remain accurate, but allowed significant deviations for accented characters, which, in the originals, had letters vertically compressed to make room for the accent. There are also lots of glyphs that were never in a 3270 terminal.

scrozier 6y ago

At my first real job, the hackers of the day (1980) were figuring out how to draw stuff on 3270 terminals. They (the terminals) were massive beasts with a somehow delicate font.

m463 6y ago

I was wondering how to get emacs to display this. after a maze of twisty passages, all alike: $ sudo apt-get install fonts-3270 $ fc-list | grep 3270 ... 3270Narrow.otf: IBM 3270 Narrow:style=Medium $ emacs ... (set-face-attribute 'default nil :family "IBM 3270 Narrow" :font "Medium" :height 140 :background "black" :foreground "green") voila! for comparison, my normal setup is: (set-face-attribute 'default nil :font "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono" :height 140 :weight 'bold :foreground "black" :background "cornsilk") I would like to see other good setups

idiocrat 6y ago
In my Visual Studio I'm using Toshiba Sat 8x14 (CP437, square 1:1) from oldschool pc fonts. For me its the best. https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/#sec2-toshiba https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/#sec2-toshiba
- reaperducer 6y ago
  I'm still searching for Sperry terminal fonts. Not from the rebadged Leading Edge machines, but from real Sperry terms.
  - idiocrat 6y ago
    Do you have any example? I tried to duck "Sperry Font" images. Found "Cholo Sperry". Is it this? https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Sperry+fonts&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fimgs3.fontbrain.com%2Fimgs%2Fd6%2F87%2F91b9333eb1e35341c26d8029cb95%2Fsa-720x400.png https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Sperry+fonts&iar=images&iax=images... EDIT: Please ignore above, I searched for "Sperry Terminal", and found these. Yes, I remember the fonts from like 30 years ago. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=sperry+terminal&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn8.bigcommerce.com%2Fs-a1x7hg2jgk%2Fimages%2Fstencil%2F1280x1280%2Fproducts%2F594%2F4518%2Fsperry-computer-terminal-t3612-00-svt-1120-22.11__49234.1489914559.jpg%3Fc%3D2%3Fimbypass%3Don https://duckduckgo.com/?q=sperry+terminal&iar=images&iax=ima...
    - 6y ago

t0astbread 6y ago

For some reason this font looks much better to me in the cool-retro-term screenshot compared to the modern terminals but I can't explain why. Does the spacing somehow seem less wide on a CRT monitor?

systemvoltage 6y ago
It's the aliasing. Phosphor displays "smooth" out the text whereas we've spend better part of the last 30 years trying to interpolate pixels to achieve the same. See font hinting - it is a rabbit hole. If you've never used a terminal before, one of those CRT amber displays, you're definitely missing out. It's a sight to behold. Not just visually, but also how instantaneous keyboard strokes appear on the screen. It will make you despise the current technology stack, operating systems and pretty much any user interface whilst you've just had the best minute and half of your life pressing keys...with a giant smile on your face. It is experiential thing - the current generation will never know or experience.
- sbierwagen 6y ago
  I distinctly remember when the local library started phasing in web-based terminals to replace text-based card catalog terminals. Early 2000s, it must have been? Slow as molasses, hard on the eyes, (Remember when every dang institutional CRT would be set to a flickery 60hz, with no way to fix it?) gummy rubber-dome keyboards on Wintel machines, but by god it was web-based, which was the Future. (Oh how right they were...) Anyone with a web browser at home could visit it, without having to bust out telnet! I stuck with the amber screen terminals, whose commands I had long-since memorized, but their numbers steadily dwindled, dwindled, until there was one left, then none. Forced into the arms of an IE6-era old school form-based web app, no shortcuts, no nothing. The data was all still text, they wouldn't have cover photos for years. Alas.
  - systemvoltage 6y ago
    I share your sadness and I emphathize. There are so many things like this that I worry, will be lost in the oblivion of time, and erased forever. I think cliche of romanticizing old ways of doing things is totally uncalled for. People don't romanticize about bad things from the old days. They pick the best ones that survived memories and thus talk about it to provide guidance for the future. We should listen to them.

protomyth 6y ago

Yeah, nostalgia. (Glances over at the S924 machine running IBM i in the server room).

rbanffy 6y ago
IBM i would be the 5250 line, IIRC. They used a similar font.

tdeck 6y ago

For those not familiar with the 3270 terminals they're actually kind of interesting and very different from more familiar character-cell terminals. I found this out doing the "master the mainframe" contest years back - it's like a whole other world. Each screen has a set of editable regions (with formatting) and the terminal provides a line editor for those regions, and a way to submit the whole screen's edits to the mainframe. That way a user can fill out a whole form without the computer receiving any interrupts at all.

rbanffy 6y ago
Kind of a web browser in the late 60's ;-)
- p_l 6y ago
  I often use exactly that comparison when describing block terminals to people - you send a page encoded in rather dense markup, and you can use that to implement forms where only user input is returned.
- freqshow 6y ago
  Long ago when I was first trying to understand how web servers worked, that was my first "light bulb" moment. "Oh...it's CICS but with IP addresses instead of port numbers."
- app4soft 6y ago
  We may still enjoy Links2[0] browsers in the modern terminals with a 3270font not only on PC, but on Android mobile too![1,2] > $ links2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24647699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24647699 [screenshot] https://i.imgur.com/9quUyEE.png https://i.imgur.com/9quUyEE.png [0] http://links.twibright.com http://links.twibright.com [1] https://repology.org/project/links/versions https://repology.org/project/links/versions [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16191843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16191843
  - rbanffy 6y ago

gorgoiler 6y ago

The history behind this is fascinating. A fun file format for a font would contain not just the foundry but also fields explaining the family tree and design affiliation of the face. Where the design came from. What the influences were. What the goals should be, for any type which is set in the font. Other foundries that have made this typeface before. Do any formats support this rich lore?

txutxu 6y ago

Tag me as a nostalgic (even if never used an IBM terminal, I did arrive to computes as a child at the 286 and DOS times). Have been using the version of this font that comes in the Debian repos like two years ago, but I always turn back to Terminus font. I got in love many years ago with Terminus, when I did configure my thinkpad T41 in a way, that TTY1 and a full screen xterm, did look exactly the same, with the terminus font. They were indistinguishable except for the cursor. I like to try new fonts from time to time, but I always return back to Terminus. I was using 3270 even out of the terminal (for the file manager, GTK apps, fluxbox menus, etc) but at the end I think it did cause visual fatigue. With Terminus doesn't happen to me (same computer, setup, etc, just changing the font).

rbanffy 6y ago
> I was using 3270 even out of the terminal (for the file manager, GTK apps, fluxbox menus, etc) but at the end I think it did cause visual fatigue. Oh no! You should not overuse it. I use it only in terminals and source code editors and that's it. It's my signal to "here: this is where you should focus" signal.
- txutxu 6y ago
  That's true. Currently using fixed type only in the window manager (bars and wm menus) but a sans type font in everything that is not a terminal. Thanks for taking the time to improve this font and publish it with proper build instructions! Good job.
  - rbanffy 6y ago
    Thank you. I love that people get to experience that small piece of computer history.

JdeBP 6y ago

Two things. First: It would be a good idea to note the FreeBSD port as well as the package. In the ports tree, this is x11-fonts/3270font . The path is important. * https://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports/head/x11-fonts/3270font/ https://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports/head/x11-fonts/3270font/ Second: The FreeBSD kernel's "vt" built-in terminal emulator has its own simple font format for Unicode bitmap fonts. It's made from Unifont HEX or BDF files with the vtfontcvt tool. Unfortunately, there's no direct path from any of the output formats here to either of those, nor are they nor the "vtfont" format generated here. This prevents using this font in one obvious place: in the kernel virtual terminal devices themselves. * https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=vtfontcvt&sektion=8 https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=vtfontcvt&sektion=... (My, user-space, terminal emulator takes the same fonts. One thing that it does that the built-in kernel one does not is permit overlaying "vtfont" fonts, where a font file need only define the glyphs specific to itself, and rely upon falling back to an underlying more general font. Having HEX files is very useful for this, as one can easily remove things like duplication of GNU Unifont, which people tend to use as a filler, by manipulating HEX files.) * http://jdebp.uk./Softwares/nosh/guide/terminal-resources.html#fonts http://jdebp.uk./Softwares/nosh/guide/terminal-resources.htm...

rbanffy 6y ago
Author here: I don't use FreeBSD myself. Is there something I should change in the README? For the vt console, I'd suggest starting with the bitmap that comes with x3270, which is what I used to trace the vector version.
- JdeBP 6y ago
  I don't know very much about fontforge, but it seems that you can get it to generate bitmap BDF fonts. One may or may not be able to run vtfontcvt on that, it not being a general purpose BDF-processing tool, but having the BDF is at least something for people to work with. (A Unifont HEX file would be better, but fontforge doesn't seem capable of that from what I can see. And unibdf2hex has some documented limitations.) > On FreeBSD the font can be installed with pkg install 3270font or from x11-fonts/3270font in the ports tree. You could even hyperlink to the port's entry on FreshPorts, https://www.freshports.org/x11-fonts/3270font/ https://www.freshports.org/x11-fonts/3270font/ , although that seems to be having WWW server problems right at this moment. (See https://www.freshports.org/search.php?query=3270font&search=go https://www.freshports.org/search.php?query=3270font&search=... for search results, which are working at the moment, for me at least.) And you are in the AUR at https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/3270-fonts/ https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/3270-fonts/ by the way.

enriquto 6y ago

It's a bit sad to see such a beautiful bitmaps blurred to death by clueless "antialiasing". Doesn't anybody appreciate clean bitmap fonts anymore? I feel like an old man yelling at passerby.

tenebrisalietum 6y ago
You can't properly appreciate them unless viewed on a CRT with it's softened edges, visible scan lines, bloom, and glow.
arexxbifs 6y ago
Font smoothing in general is pretty bad but in Linux it's abysmal. I use bitmap fonts as much as possible and I turn AA off for all fonts below a certain size (18 px IIRC). I also force Firefox to exclusively use Arial because of the excellent hinting. Things are so much more legible and crisp it's not even funny. (Edit: Funny thing is, I remember font smoothing as much better in general maybe 10-15 years ago. Perhaps it was just the novelty that appealed to me then.)
- KozmoNau7 6y ago
  I've found the font rendering to be very good indeed ever since the Truetype2 patent expired, so the proper byte-code interpreter could be enabled in Freetype and the autohinter disabled. I find the rendering on Linux (KDE Neon and openSUSE for me) to be vastly superior to Windows 10. It was already very good on my old 27" ~108ppi display, but it's even better now that I have a 4K display that's ~163ppi, which I run at 150% scale. Crisp shapes, no blurring at all. It's all at default settings, subpixel rendering on and slight hinting.
  - gombosg 6y ago
    > the proper byte-code interpreter could be enabled in Freetype and the autohinter disabled Can you point me to some docs about how this can be done?
    - 6y ago

FerretFred 6y ago

Wow! Back to the 80s! Bliss ... Now all I need is the white noise from the computer suite aircon, the shitty fluorescent lighting and to lower the room temperature quite a lot..

TomMasz 6y ago

Oh man, this brings back memories. When I first got started in my career we developed on an IBM 370 and I spent a lot of time on 3270s. Eventually, though, we got our own VAX that we didn't have to share with the rest of the company and never looked back. Still, it took a while to adjust to the early EDT editor.

Alex63 6y ago
I don't miss EDT so much, but I wish someone would create an OSS version of EVE/TPU. As a developer, that's one of the things I remember best about moving from RSTS to VMS. That and the "symbolic debugger".