Meyrin: CERN Terminal Font | Hacker News Reader

Meyrin: CERN Terminal Font

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94 pointsbpierre39 comments

For 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/, 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, and you may be able to find a better copy by doing more searching.

It 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.

The 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.

> 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!

Or do the sensible thing and print only printable characters.

Nah; with these old machines, often an "unprintable character" would turn out to be the only way to get a "é" or a "¢".

I 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...

I 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.

You just have to emulate the blurring inherent in a CRT display :)

Here's the most complete crt emulator I've seen: http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/01/cathode-vintage-terminal-emu...

see also: scanline generator device:

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 ...

You 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.

I've had the same problem with this and other "real glass TTY"-type fonts, and have yet to understand why the font authors don't provide a version without the scanlines, for use with terminal emulators which don't go so far as to emulate a CRT display.

Clever. 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.

Good catch, I'll see what I can do about fixing that!

It's a pretty sweet font. I just made a little test with @font-face: http://hugo.sx/meyrin/

Definately looks better with some blur

    text-shadow: 0 0 4px rgba(0,255,0,1.0)

You're right! Added, thanks!

That does look better. How could a blur be incorporated into the ttf?

You 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

I might be wrong, but I believe that Inkscape has the ability to do blurring.

The TTF format does not, however.

Scanline spacing looks uneven to me. A size multiple of 14 (the original size) would be better.

Probably due to lack of hinting.

Here is VT220 emulation font of similar style (complete with scanlines): http://sensi.org/~svo/glasstty/

edit: webfont sample here: http://johanneshoff.com/vt220/

This 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 :-)

> 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.

I 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.

For those who don't know "Meyrin" is the name of the municipality that hosts part of the CERN.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meyrin

Wow, I didn't realize it was this easy to make a font from SVG files. Thanks!

I 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

The short eBook is also available: https://gumroad.com/l/FpfR

I 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/

Since this has the scanlines “baked in”, just be sure to disable Cathode’s own emulation or it’ll be pretty ugly.

Cathode doesn't let you use custom fonts sadly.

Yes it does! Preferences -> Font, and under “Modern”, it will let you use any monospaced font.

I just wanted the Cathode font ...

lack 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-...

I'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.

However, 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/

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

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.

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