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Comment by aldousd666 | Hacker News Reader

It's because they couldn't easily draw letters below the line. It was all block-aligned. They used blitted bits from a lookup table and copied them into squares on the screen that did not vary from letter to letter

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You can leave a row or two free for the descenders, and it doesn't look too objectionable. An 8x8 grid is plenty for a useful character set. Some examples: https://damieng.com/blog/2011/02/20/typography-in-8-bits-sys...

There's even a couple of 6x8 ones here: https://damieng.com/blog/2014/07/20/typography-in-bits-other...

What line? As you say, they were just bitmaps, so the font designer could declare the font's baseline as "3/4 of the way down the character bitmap and draw lower case letters just fine.

Lower-cased letters have both ascenders and descenders. Fitting both of those in 8 pixels is doable but leaves you with either the clipped ascenders or mangled descenders that you see in old 8-pixel lower-cased typefaces - your method works, but the results are poor. Upper cased Latin letters are far more amenable to rasterizing down to small sizes than lower cased.

Though the real reason behind the question is that teletypes printed in upper case, early computers copied teletypes and followed that convention which carried on through the 8-bit era.

then it would look crappy relative to capital letters "Ajax" - if the j bottomed out where the A does, it messes with the whole look. There's a whole world that we take for granted that typesetters/font-makers/graphic designers have figured out for us.

That's what e.g. the ADM-3a did and imo it looks a little funny but surprisingly pleasant: https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/adm3a.jpg

The question here was why they didn't use lower case letters exclusively instead of using upper case exclusively. In other words, if you have to pick one, why did they pick upper case instead of lower case? The difficulty of mixing cases doesn't apply to the question.

Exclusively lower case letters need more vertical space than exclusively upper case letters. "fgjl" has the same "top line" as "FGJL" but has a bottom line that's at least two pixels lower.

There are lots of 8x8 bitmap fonts for LCDs and 8-bit retro systems where they just didn't care about descenders being below the floor of the font. Aesthetically suboptimal but didn't stop them from being used in production.

Choice of case predates video display terminals by a very long time.

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