Text-mode apps (Was :Who are the "spacists"?)

[Steve D'Aprano]

On Mon, 27 Mar 2017 03:57 am, Mikhail V wrote:

[...]
>>> And more important: can one use binary (bitmap) fonts in default modern
>>> linux console? If yes, can one patch them with custom tiles at
>>> the application start?
>>
>> If you really need something completely custom, it's not text any
>> more.
> 
> Obvious fact, but if I need e.g. rounded corners in table drawing
> characters? Or I just want to fix some characters which look especially
> ugly? Create a new TTF? No, thanks, this would be worst nightmare to
> do without a special tool (which have prices with several zeros, otherwise
> just don't work and can even break things system-wide)

Don't be silly. It took me ten seconds on Google to find this:

https://birdfont.org/

It is no charge for an open source licence, or $5 USD for a commercial
licence. If that's too cheap, you can use FontCreator at just $79:

http://www.high-logic.com/font-editor/fontcreator.html



>> More likely, you don't truly need something custom - what you need is
>> a different subset of characters (maybe you need to mix Latin, Greek,
>> and Hebrew letters, in order to show interlinear translation of the
>> Bible). Instead of messing around with character sets, you can just
>> use Unicode and have all of them available.
> 
> If I was to deal with multiple language charsets in _my own_ rendering
> app, I would still use discrete encoding for inner algorithms.
> i.e. I would place separate charsets on separate code ranges.

Why? Because you think you know better than the thousands of professionals
who have worked with text formats for decades?


> And for own standalone app, I would not use any TTF or
> anything vector-based font, since why?

Right, because your users will *love* to see their native language displayed
in a crappy bitmapped font with jagged or blurry edges.



-- 
Steve
“Cheer up,” they said, “things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure
enough, things got worse.