Robert Sawyer mentioned the Cousine font as an alternative for the internal vDos font. I had a look at that, it’s basically the same as the Liberation Mono font. Cousine has far more characters defined than the vDos font, so it could indeed be a good substitute for the current vDos font. I did some first modifications to make it more suitable for DOS/vDos.
Though I’m concerned about some Cyrillic and Greek glyphs (characters), they just don’t fit in the fixed dimensions of DOS character cells. I cross-checked some with the Windows Consolas font, it has the same oddities. So if anyone could comment on that…
Attached CousineTest.ttf, copy that to the vDos folder and set FONT=cousinetest in config.txt to test.
Next could be to use that same font as the default for printing. I don’t intend to create a bold face variant of it. It’s is already somewhat more prominent than for instance Courier New. So using a lighter shaded font for normal text would have to do.
Thank you for this, Jos! CousineTest.ttf seems to work fine with WordStar, containing all the PC-8 glyphs the program relies on for screen displays / menus / buttons / doodads.
Rob
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Thank you for pointing out the existence of the Cousine font. Though I’m more interested in the oddities of that font (like also those of Consolas).
By now I think to know what it is all about. But before going further to clean up, modify that font and make it internal to vDos. Not only for displaying, also for printing, I await responses of vDos users with non-English code pages (Czech, Greek..).
Jos
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
I concluded my primary (time-consuming and painstaking) job on the Cousine font; some global optimization to replace the standard font in vDos, cleaning up and corrections.
The new TTF file is smaller, but supports code pages to a greater extent than the first and original Cousine font files. This TTF file still needs some work to be a real substitute for the current vDos internal font.
The support of code pages is now more or less permanent. Attached “Missing Glyphs” shows what is missing. The last column is Courier New, mostly used for printing. Probably I’ll also change the default print font to the new internal vDos font, so printouts will also look a bit more modern.
Hope it helps vDos’ usability in non-English languages w/o the need for external fonts.
The new Cousine internal font will also be the default instead of Courier for printing. I think it makes the output look somewhat more modern. Though there’s one limitation: no bold face defined in this font and that is used sometimes. I don’t go into the trouble to create one.
To distinguish normal from bold, normal is printed in a lighter shade. Attached Cousine.pdf has the “Memory section” printed in bold.
Robert Sawyer mentioned the Cousine font as an alternative for the internal vDos font. I had a look at that, it’s basically the same as the Liberation Mono font. Cousine has far more characters defined than the vDos font, so it could indeed be a good substitute for the current vDos font. I did some first modifications to make it more suitable for DOS/vDos.
Though I’m concerned about some Cyrillic and Greek glyphs (characters), they just don’t fit in the fixed dimensions of DOS character cells. I cross-checked some with the Windows Consolas font, it has the same oddities. So if anyone could comment on that…
Attached CousineTest.ttf, copy that to the vDos folder and set FONT=cousinetest in config.txt to test.
Next could be to use that same font as the default for printing. I don’t intend to create a bold face variant of it. It’s is already somewhat more prominent than for instance Courier New. So using a lighter shaded font for normal text would have to do.
Jos
Last edit: Jos Schaars 2016-08-08
Thank you for this, Jos! CousineTest.ttf seems to work fine with WordStar, containing all the PC-8 glyphs the program relies on for screen displays / menus / buttons / doodads.
Rob
Thank you for pointing out the existence of the Cousine font. Though I’m more interested in the oddities of that font (like also those of Consolas).
By now I think to know what it is all about. But before going further to clean up, modify that font and make it internal to vDos. Not only for displaying, also for printing, I await responses of vDos users with non-English code pages (Czech, Greek..).
Jos
I concluded my primary (time-consuming and painstaking) job on the Cousine font; some global optimization to replace the standard font in vDos, cleaning up and corrections.
The new TTF file is smaller, but supports code pages to a greater extent than the first and original Cousine font files. This TTF file still needs some work to be a real substitute for the current vDos internal font.
The support of code pages is now more or less permanent. Attached “Missing Glyphs” shows what is missing. The last column is Courier New, mostly used for printing. Probably I’ll also change the default print font to the new internal vDos font, so printouts will also look a bit more modern.
Jos
Last edit: Jos Schaars 2016-08-14
Thank you so much for this, Jos!
Hope it helps vDos’ usability in non-English languages w/o the need for external fonts.
The new Cousine internal font will also be the default instead of Courier for printing. I think it makes the output look somewhat more modern. Though there’s one limitation: no bold face defined in this font and that is used sometimes. I don’t go into the trouble to create one.
To distinguish normal from bold, normal is printed in a lighter shade. Attached Cousine.pdf has the “Memory section” printed in bold.
Jos