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Comment by blickentwapft | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know why but I love VGA text mode fonts. This project is awesome.

Are there pictures of the fonts? I didn’t see any.

My first computer was a Commodore64. My only real complaint at the time was how the "!" was displayed. It was a straight line with a square dot. It felt incomplete somehow and IIRC looked too much like another character (can't remember which one, maybe "i"??).

Then I got my first VGA output with a 386.

The exclamation mark was now curvy and sexy! Thick at the top, curving down to a point, finished with a round dot. I thought everything was right in the world.

I miss that font.

I've tried reusing bitmapped fonts that give me my desired output but I find it just doesn't work in enough places that it's too annoying. Maybe it messes up curses output, or UTF-8 incompatibilities?

You have to give Commodore (or whoever designed that font) some slack.

VGA (in typically used character modes) had more bits per character, and its fonts didn’t have to be designed to be legible when displayed on a television set (screen not designed for text display, and signal converted to antenna signal and back)

Also, are you sure about that “round dot”? https://github.com/spacerace/romfont/blob/master/font-images... doesn’t show it, and any non-squareness would require a width of at least 3 pixels (more likely 4) to draw.

I guess I was wrong about the dot. But I also remember the taper on the exclamation mark being finer and less blocky. Obviously I remember through rose coloured glasses. Wolfenstien3D didn't look as bad as modern screenshots show either! =)

I don't doubt the C64 designers did the best with what they could; but I was absolutely impressed with how good the "!" looked on that VGA screen.

My only real complaint at the time was how the "!" was displayed

Then you must have missed the atrocity that was the Commodore's @ symbol.

None of the early computers did a good job with it. I remember the Tandy machines were particularly bad.

The top and bottom halves of the CGA X character was not symmetric. It's so ugly I can picture it in my head.

If you've spent a decade looking at VGA screens, its font will be intensely legible to you, regardless how objectively terrible they definitely are. Our ability to read is pattern recognition, and if your brain's neural network is well trained for the VGA text font, it makes sense that you might love them.

Heck—if you spent years reading your terminal upside down, you'd get very good at that too. Eventually you might get nostalgic for it.

¡pǝǝɹƃ∀

VGA monospaced text always looked kind of exotic to me, because I started out looking mainly at the Amiga's Topaz font. Before that, the TRS-80 font, which also seems to have been quite different. And after that, the Macintosh's Monaco and Courier. I always hated Windows Courier New and much prefer Consolas. My favorite is, or was, Computer Modern Typewriter.

There's a folder of images at https://github.com/spacerace/romfont/tree/master/font-images

https://github.com/spacerace/romfont/tree/master/font-images

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