pouët.net

Some of you here may already be familiar with the older version(s) of this thing. To those who aren't - especially textmode fans/ANSI artists and the like, perhaps it'll be up your alley.

What's in the new update, then?

- 200+ font remakes of classic PC text mode/hardware charsets
- new formats (truetype w/embedded bitmaps, truetype w/aspect correction)
- a new online index for the various fonts, "curated" with background information and the appropriate historical context
- a "sandbox" page for each font, so you can play around with sizes, aspect ratios and sample texts

There's more, but typing it all out hasn't helped my return-on-investment ratio thus far, so I'll cut the crap and just drop the link here. :)

https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/

Comments welcome... enjoy!

Does it include the CRT effect VT220 font?
https://github.com/lalo/VT220-mod-font

Very nice!

wow, this is really great

The VT220's a classic, but nope - I'm keeping the collection strictly PC (as in IBM PC and compatibles, even if "semi-compatibles" are now included). Mostly because other platforms are already well-covered elsewhere... and as you can see, the scope for PC-only is pretty crazy as it is!

It's sort of a neat idea to bake the CRT effect into the font, but also kind of touchy to pull off, since the results are going to vary pretty wildly between different sizes, resolutions, renderers and AA algorithms...

I'm using the Amstrad font for some time in my code editors and I love it ! ;-)
https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/#sec2-amstrad

Nice - I suppose that now you can get it aspect-corrected as well :) My own choice for coding/etc. now is this nice and clean Toshiba Satellite font: https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/font?toshibasat_8x14

Fun trivia #1: the trick to make the .ttf-with-embedded-bitmaps ("Mx") fonts to play nice with Windows involved planting fake news in the MS Codepages table, to make Windows believe that the font supports Japanese... otherwise it won't display the bitmaps(!).

Fun triviia #2: a font from my pack (identifiable by name) recently cropped up in Microsoft's docs for the new Windows Terminal (linky). With that green-screen look they're going for, they really should've used the IBM MDA font instead. :D

VileR: Not much else to say apart from this is an astounding effort and really appreciated. Great work!

A lot of cool stuff in there, thanks for sharing :)

Thanks all, appreciated!

Thanks to an insightful tester, the docs are now slightly updated with some info about improving appearance on macOS.
Moral of the story: never trust UI options to really do what they claim to do!

Wow, this is totally amazing. Loving the font selector on the webpage itself, it really drives home how well these are done.

I also really love the usage instructions, like the font sizes etc. This really makes it easy for people to use these properly.

One suggestion, maybe link to the CC-BY-SA page from the bulleted list on the homepage?

Oh! One more bit of feedback: the CC license says that you should be credited, but it's not immediately obvious to me exactly how you want to be credited. As VileR? Your realname? A specific sentence + link to the site?

If you put an easy to copypaste sentence for this on the site (eg on the download page), you make it easier for people to abide by the license.

skrebbel: thanks, both good ideas. I like to have that info in one place, so I've added it under "legal stuff" (including the "how to credit me" bit), but the homepage and the download page now have links to it.

Might be worth looking into the fonts by Microsoft as well, I believe they were distinct from IBM ones, and arguably more common. There are various .cpi files in different versions of MS-DOS and even Windows (both 9x and NT series), so it's a bit of a rat's nest to untangle though.

By the way, the legal page provides a license for your collection under copyright, and at the same time points out that fonts aren't copyrightable. I'm not sure you can have your cake and eat it, but that question is best left to a lawyer if you truly care!

Well, not exactly... the point I tried to make there is that there's a distinction, which resolves the ambiguity:

• Typefaces (as designs, including things like plain raw data / visual glyph shapes) aren't covered by copyright
  
• Computer fonts, in the modern sense, are file formats that contain executable (e.g. .fon) or interpreted (e.g. .ttf) code which is used to render the characters for display; so for copyright purposes they are technically software
  

I get that this may sound like splitting hairs... but I've seen some speculations that my collection was one giant copyright infringement, etc. So I had to dispel them by pointing out that all the original charsets it covers fall under the first definition.