Hacker News
JdeBPI have just made a couple of adjustments to my #Unscii fork.
Line drawing should now line up when using the PET8 and PET16 fonts. And some arrows that were mis-mapped in a couple of the others, because of 1963 ASCII, have been fixed.
It doesn't look quite right on a 16:9 HDMI display with a 16 by 16 font. It lacks the pixellation and CRT blurring. And the cursor is wrong. So @ColinHaynes still has the better. (-:
But it's not bad for a non-X11 framebuffer Unicode-capable terminal emulator on a #RaspberryPi running #NetBSD with the #CommodorePET and BBC character sets.
From the looks of that, Unscii already has both of the glyph sets, and Markus Neeb's changes aren't adding any new glyphs (just putting some PET ones into the C64 set) so don't make a difference.
I'm already getting the text mode guttering by dint of the 7by7 font being rendered into 8by8 bitmaps. (-:
I noticed yesterday from a Hacker News post that I hadn't checked in changes that I made to my fork of @viznut's #Unscii back in 2023. So I spent some hours sorting through them and checking them in.
All so that you can enjoy 16by16 script-upscaled and hand-rounded versions of the 8by8 BBC Micro and Commodore PET bitmap fonts. (-:
https://github.com/jdebp/unscii/blob/2.1.1f/src/font-bbcg16.txt
https://github.com/jdebp/unscii/blob/2.1.1f/src/font-pet16.txt
There's a bizarre font bug in both #unscii and #funscii that I have fixed locally and have to push out. Half of the uppercase letters in one of the 8-bit fonts are off by one code point.
I spotted this when my Z shell prompt changed to "JdeBQ".
It does mean that that font is missing a letter. I tried to look for an authoritative original source to fill it in from, but couldn't find one.
This gave me an idea. Although the 8×8 fonts cannot be synthetically obliqued and boldfaced, because they are square, rectangular Ubuntu Mono can be.
So I can use #unscii PET for upright medium, unscii #BBCMicro for upright boldface, and #UbuntuMono for the oblique medium and boldface.
It works out fairly well.
The 8×8 #BBCMicro font from #unscii works rather better than Ubuntu Mono does, when rendering virtual terminals to the framebuffer with console-fb-realizer, I think. And the PET font from unscii works better still.
Interestingly, #Unifont 15 has an "_all" version with the same problem as #unscii "-full", and the additional problem that it has placeholder glyphs and is thus not suitable in any position other than final.
However, it does have a not "_all" alternative that breaks up its hex files by plane and doesn't have placeholders; and so doesn't hit #FreeBSD's vt font file limit if one does a 1-to-1 conversion.
I was seeing bizarre effects in my framebuffer virtual terminals with some Unicode 13 tests, such as glyphs coming out as half-emoticon and half-hangeul.
It turns out that with the "-full" version of @viznut's #unscii I was hitting the 65535-glyph limit of #FreeBSD's vt font file format.
The not "-full" version of unscii has far fewer glyphs, and also means that I can use a more up-to-date #Unifont than what comes in unscii.
So I switched to that, and the half-and-half glyphs have gone away.