The IBM PC was meant to support both color and monochrome displays though ("color" meaning "cheap TV-resolution CGA" :-)), and there are hints that both functions were originally supposed to go on the same adapter board. That plus cost cutting are probably why the same ROM chip contained both the color and monochrome fonts, so neither of them could have been very high-res...
Actually back in the bad old DOS days I went as far as realizing that it was really easy to replace the "default" font (at least on German/non-US machines, which installed a different font from a file which contained the correct characters for the German code page). So I wrote a small program to hack this code page file and insert my own sans-serif font. An additional realization was that 8 = 3+1+3+1 - so if you designed your "pattern characters" to have 2 "patterned" columns 3 pixels wide and 2 empty columns 1 pixel wide (so the repeated column would be empty too), the pattern would look nicer when shown in the 9x16 matrix. I wonder if I still have that laying around somewhere...
When the project started, they were way way behind in the home PC market
Which font was that?
I'm not sure which was the first machine that had the distinctive MDA look that flowed into CGA, EGA, and VGA. Could be something created for the PC.
If all else failed, it'd be nicer if they just did like Commodore and copied the Atari 8-bit one with wide stems. The NTSC output for the CGA board more or less mandated the wide stems to prevent color artifacts.
See: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BitmapFontConversion
As a side effect, the fonts will probably work better as OTB anyway. At least, that’s my experience.
I do want to include .bdf fonts in future versions, especially if the conversion is as simple as that. But if I do it I want to be sure I do it correctly, and I'm still not 100% familiar with the format.
I'd be interested in generating some bitmap conversions of some classic non-VGA fonts, like Apple's bitmap fonts (some of which were never converted to TrueType!) and some X11 standards like fixed13.
I didn't even know FF Even Had a GUI until I read your comment
I wish there was a CSS framework for this type of UI language
I have fairly thick and high-refractive-index glasses and can regularly experience this phenomenon where different-colored text shifts in different directions, creating a "3D" effect. The Microsoft logo is a great example of this: if I tilt my head up the red/orange and blue squares seem to move toward each other, and the yellow and green ones away from each other, and vice versa if I tilt my head down.
Another might be chromatic aberration if you wear glasses. (This causes the Windows logo to look comically maligned for me.) Whether it's behind or in front of the text would depend on the tilt of your head.
Finding this: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/307356/what-is-the-...
And this is the TTF of that font: https://github.com/Zygo/xscreensaver/blob/master/OSX/gallant...
It doesn't have to be scalable to arbitrary sizes - 2x of the original would do just fine on a wide variety of high-DPI screens, just as the original itself worked on a very broad historical range of non-high-DPI ones.
2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16098262
2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14695319
2016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11021430
It's a fine thing to submit but the cutoff for dupes is about a year: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
Edit: scratch that, we'll make an exception since it's the first new release in several years. See discussion in subthread below.
Btw, thanks for doing the hard and important work of moderating hn! [Edit: I realize now that the last part may come off as sarcastic, so I want to emphasize it is sincere. While here I disagree with the action, I'm generally very thankful for the moderators' work.]
I'd be happy to make an exception if there's a case for the diff with v2.
[1] you've probably already seen it, it's this one https://github.com/kristopolous/BOOTSTRA.386
