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Theoretical Lynx Font


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One of my interests right now is in typography, i.e. fonts. As such, I was wondering if I could do some small service to the Lynx development community by creating a functional font. If such was possible I was wondering what format a font that functioned on Lynx would be and how many characters for this theoretical typeface.

 

As a proof of the concept, I present a small conceptual sample of what it could look like. I'm not sure how many characters it would need, so I stuck to the basics already present on my keyboard.

 

post-31984-0-01921100-1406521371.png

 

I'm not a professional font designer, in fact I have no font designing software - the above was done purely in Photoshop - and I can't code a single line of BASIC.

 

Thoughts?

 

p.s.: Ignore the strange thing to the far left of each line. It was my personal height identifier - max height from what I'm calling the "baseline" (official font terminology but I've got only a faint idea of what it actually means) upwards is seven pixels., from the baseline downwards, only two pixels.

Edited by AtariLynx Lover
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There is actually two ways to think about a font. One is raster and the other one is sprites.

 

The "classic" way is to create a sprite that is one pixel high and 160 pixels wide. You then fill it from your font buffer and print it. This means that one row of text becomes 8 sprites.

 

This is the way the current cc65 compiler outputs text.

 

Another approach is to create single letter sprites. In this case the height and width of the character can be pretty much anything. Your "Theoretical font" fits the single character sprite approach as it is not a monospace font.

 

I have made a few small fonts by using the latter technique.

An Atari look-alike font: https://bitbucket.org/karri/atari/src

An Arial look-alike font: https://bitbucket.org/karri/arial/src

An Haiku font: https://bitbucket.org/karri/haiku/src

post-2099-0-32374200-1406615130_thumb.png

 

Your Theoretical font looks good. Easy to read and small. You could take one of my example fonts and change the bitmaps with your own design.

Edited by karri
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Yes, You need to save every character separately as a pcx file. Then you also need to set the hot-spot for every character so it creates a sensible sprite.

 

It is about 2-3 hours of work.

 

After you have done it all you can publish the font and let others use it in their games.

 

> By the way - that's a nice font you've made.

 

Thanks, I'd like to take the credit for these fonts... But they were not created by me. I found some public domain fonts that looked cool and just wrote drivers for them.

 

Lately I have mainly used these special fonts for my code. They look nice, especially Ariel. And they take less space than the standard font.

 

I also created a special tgi-driver that lacks fonts completely to save space. In this way I can use my special fonts and mix and match between typefaces.

 

If you want to know how this exiting novel ends I have attached it all. Enjoy!

snoopy.zip

Edited by karri
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In the makefile you need to define from which pixel the drawing starts. Suzy will draw 4 quadrants around the hot spot. So if the hot spot is on the top left corner then drawing a character at 0, 0 will show the entire character in top left corner of the screen. If the hot spot is in the center of the character Then only the right bottom quarter of the character will fit the screen.

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NP. The font looks nice. If it is ok I could write a small driver for it and put it in bitbucket and a copy here to the forum.

 

Using the font from cc65 would be by calling

 

tgi_theorethicalxy(x, y, text);

 

Perhaps the font finds its way to some game.

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NP. The font looks nice. If it is ok I could write a small driver for it and put it in bitbucket and a copy here to the forum.

 

Using the font from cc65 would be by calling

 

tgi_theorethicalxy(x, y, text);

 

Perhaps the font finds its way to some game.

 

Feel free - actually, I've created an updated version.

 

post-31984-0-12752500-1407103494.png

 

The font is now named Thyrum Bits :P

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  • 2 weeks later...

There is a little Calvin and Hobbes feeling about the font due to variations in letter sizes.

 

I still have many special characters from another font but the letters and numbers are correct now.

 

post-2099-0-54144900-1407823887_thumb.png

 

The font is very dense. You can easily squeeze 30+ character per line instead of the standard 20 chars.

 

When I am ready I will post the file thyrumbits.c here. You only need to add it to your project and use tgi_thyrumbits(x, y, string) to use it.

Edited by karri
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What about extending Thyrum Bits to contain the full ISO 8859-1 character set? This might be nice for non-English words.

 

post-2099-0-25857800-1407826043_thumb.png

 

In the code we could add a define like

 

#define FULL_ISO_8859_1_SET

 

to add the lower characters of the table.

 

Or we could use ISO 8859-15 to get €

 

post-2099-0-09539700-1407826538_thumb.png

 

 

Edited by karri
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