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Meyrin: CERN Terminal Font
- Create 13y agolack of an element of social responsibility in the contract policy is unacceptable. Rather than serve as a cushion of laziness for supervisors, who often have only a limited and utilitarian view when defining the opening of an IC post, the contract policy must ensure the inclusion of an element of social justice, which is cruelly absent today. http://staff-association.web.cern.ch/content/unsatisfactory-contract-policy http://staff-association.web.cern.ch/content/unsatisfactory-...
- pinko 13y agoI'd actually welcome a new post about this issue, which I haven't known much about before. However, this is the wrong thread. Good luck.
- Create 13y agoHowever, this is the wrong thread This thread is about a branding exercise on CERN. Which is a pity, because trendy retro hipster feel-good sugar-coat marketing propaganda will do more harm to CERN and its cause than good on the long run. Ask Herwig Schopper if in doubt. Just to illustrate my point, here is a quote: After digging and digging, we came to the conclusion that the font rendered on screen wasn’t going to be a font-file, it was probably C code in the drivers for the screen. This was disheartening since there was no easy template to build from or convert. The guy and his audience has apparently very little notion on how a terminal works (let alone how it is built), never mind about the computer itself. For educational purposes, here is a better way to go about a similar digging: http://www.nycresistor.com/2012/08/21/ghosts-in-the-rom/ http://www.nycresistor.com/2012/08/21/ghosts-in-the-rom/ Which would actually lead to the old character map in the ROM that would be seen glowing on a CRT. Case in point about XOFF: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7587088 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7587088 And again, right on topic, however only accessible for those who do not suffer from functional analphabetism: Strangely, not only has it forgotten how to fly, it also seems to have forgotten that it has forgotten how to fly. Legend has it that a seriously worried kakapo will sometimes run up a tree and jump out of it, whereupon it flies like a brick and lands in a graceless heap on the ground. ps: the post is old, because the issue is old and recurring. It is a reminder against the memory hole.
- hsx 13y agoIt's a pretty sweet font. I just made a little test with @font-face: http://hugo.sx/meyrin/ http://hugo.sx/meyrin/
- ajanuary 13y agoDefinately looks better with some blur text-shadow: 0 0 4px rgba(0,255,0,1.0)
- hsx 13y agoYou're right! Added, thanks!
- brodney 13y agoThat does look better. How could a blur be incorporated into the ttf?
- owenversteeg 13y agoI might be wrong, but I believe that Inkscape has the ability to do blurring.
- taejo 13y agoThe TTF format does not, however.
- dictum 13y agoYou could get an effect similar to blur adding many small circles/ellipses around the glyphs[1], but the glyph size would increase significantly and that could be an issue for some rendering engines. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halftone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halftone
- zokier 13y agoScanline spacing looks uneven to me. A size multiple of 14 (the original size) would be better.
- bhauer 13y agoClever. Just a small nit I noticed at first glance: the tail of the lowercase 't' uses two horizontal pixels in the photo, but only one was provided in the font.
- briansuda 13y agoGood catch, I'll see what I can do about fixing that!
- owenversteeg 13y agoWow, I didn't realize it was this easy to make a font from SVG files. Thanks!
- briansuda 13y agoI have written about how to make your own fonts. Both regular and symbol fonts. You can see a short online video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ltm-psNPxI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ltm-psNPxI The short eBook is also available: https://gumroad.com/l/FpfR https://gumroad.com/l/FpfR
- jlgaddis 13y agoI don't have my MBP nearby to try it out, but this font + "Cathode" [0] seems like it'd be pretty neat. [0]: http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/ http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/
- nwh 13y agoCathode doesn't let you use custom fonts sadly.
- drivingmenuts 13y agoI just wanted the Cathode font ...
- rubberbandage 13y agoYes it does! Preferences -> Font, and under “Modern”, it will let you use any monospaced font.
- rubberbandage 13y agoSince this has the scanlines “baked in”, just be sure to disable Cathode’s own emulation or it’ll be pretty ugly.
- donpdonp 13y agoI love the history/nostalgia in this font, but after opening a Gnome Terminal with the .ttf font, its unusable. The characters are full of horizontal 'scan lines' which look neat when zoomed in but make the font fade to almost nothing on a black background. Ironically the sceenshot in the story for the terminal shows solid characters.
- Sharlin 13y agoYou just have to emulate the blurring inherent in a CRT display :)
- rsync 13y agosee also: scanline generator device: http://arcadeforge.net/SLG3000/Scanline-Generator-SLG3000::12.html http://arcadeforge.net/SLG3000/Scanline-Generator-SLG3000::1... (or a XRGB device) ... lots of retro gaming folks use these to emulate CRT artifacts on an LCD panel ...
- cjensen 13y agoHere's the most complete crt emulator I've seen: http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/01/cathode-vintage-terminal-emulator/ http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/01/cathode-vintage-terminal-emu...
- Theodores 13y agoYou also have to emulate an analog signal. With a digital display pixels can go from on to off just like that, however, I doubt that an analog signal really does go from on to off in a perfect 'square wave'. Even then those coils in the electron gun have things like hysteresis to contend with. As for that blurring, on green screen monitors there were no rgb arrangements in the phosphor, it was continual. The blurring was for persistence in a time when refresh rates were orders of magnitude below 100Hz. There was also the small matter of interlacing. Kids today have no idea what that is but it was standard for low refresh rate applications such as a VT terminal. All considered a drop in font is not really up to the job, even if really well designed.
- aaronem 13y ago
- raldi 13y ago> This meant we needed to write a quick shell script to loop from 0 to 255 and try to output to screen the ASCII representation [...] The computer locked-up and we needed to hard-reset it That sounds like you echoed a Ctrl-S character, which tells a terminal to stop updating; the opposite command is Ctrl-Q, but since that came earlier in your sequence rather than later, you were out of luck. Try reversing the for-loop next time!
- zokier 13y agoOr do the sensible thing and print only printable characters.
- raldi 13y agoNah; with these old machines, often an "unprintable character" would turn out to be the only way to get a "é" or a "¢".
- NoodleIncident 13y agoI learned this tidbit when I got tired of having to kill tmux panes whenever I fat-fingered my 'alt-tab' key combo, C-a C-s. Felt pretty stupid when I found out that it was that simple...
- zokier 13y agoHere is VT220 emulation font of similar style (complete with scanlines): http://sensi.org/~svo/glasstty/ http://sensi.org/~svo/glasstty/ edit: webfont sample here: http://johanneshoff.com/vt220/ http://johanneshoff.com/vt220/
- rubberbandage 13y agoThis font even takes into account the imprecision of analog scanlines — the lines that make up the characters are subtly rounded. It’s a very enjoyable font, though a bit impractical :-)
- __david__ 13y ago> It’s a very enjoyable font, though a bit impractical :-) On Hi-DPI displays, it's actually pretty usable. On my retina Macbook at 14 points it looks pretty much how I remember my old vt-220 looking. IE, very readable.
- varkson 13y agoI ran this as my main terminal font for quite a while. As long as you set it to the exact size it's designed for, it's actually very readable.
- sdkmvx 13y agoFor those who don't know (apparently including the authors), this is the standard 3270/IBM terminal font. It is available all over the web in various formats, notably in bitmap format with http://x3270.bgp.nu/ http://x3270.bgp.nu/, though it is in a different encoding (EBCDIC probably). I may look into converting it later. There's also one a copy at https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font, and you may be able to find a better copy by doing more searching.
- ihuman 13y agoIt looks like this project is trying to also trying to "port" how the pixels and resolution effected the font, while the ones you linked to are just the same shape, and rendered with a higher resolution.
- rbanffy 13y agoThe one provided by x3270 was originally copied by a Georgia Tech student (IIRC), pixel by pixel, from an IBM terminal. The one I made was created by retracing one of the x3270 bitmaps using FontForge so that it could be comfortably used as a monospaced font in modern setups. I wish I had a functioning IBM 3270/9, but those are incredibly rare. Legend says the 2260 (an older terminal family) had its video signal generated on the terminal controller (another box where you plugged your terminals) and the font bitmap was actually visible, implemented in ferrite core memory.
- chli 13y agoFor those who don't know "Meyrin" is the name of the municipality that hosts part of the CERN. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meyrin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meyrin