[geeks] looking for bitmap Font

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Thu, Jun 27, 2002 at 06:18:28PM -0500, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
> On Thu, 27 Jun 2002, Joshua D Boyd wrote:
> 
> > All the digits of course.  a set of all lowercaser letters.  Basic
> > puncuation and math symbols.  I think a lambda, sigma, pi, and theta
> > characters would also be good. A capital D.  Well, the main thing is
> > the alphanumerics and basic math and punctuation symbals.  It's not
> > like it is really hard to make them.  Just a pain to do them all when
> > the exist already.
> 
> Okay, I've got something for you here:
> 
>    http://jonathan.celestrion.net/crap/8x12.zip
> 
> Included are three 208x25 xpm files:
>    alpha.english.xpm
>    alpha.greek.xpm
>    numsym.xpm
> 
> The first two are the Greek and English, with caps in the top 12 rows of
> pixels, a blank row, and lowercase in the bottom 12 rows.  The English
> file is pretty-much a straight screencap of xfontsel viewing
> "-*-fixed-clean-r-*-*-16-*-*-*-*-*-*-*" under IRIX.  Some things had to be
> readjusted to fit properly (since it's an 8x13 font), but it's otherwise
> straight Clean.
> 
> I did the Greek alphabet by hand from an enlarged screen capture of
> "-*-symbol-medium-r-*-*-12-*-*-*-*-*-*-*" under IRIX, which is a
> proportional font.  It's ugly because I have all the artistic talents of a
> dylexic lemur on cheap cocaine; however, characters that are similar
> between the two fonts should be visually distinct.  Anyone on the list
> who'd like to make it look less-ugly is welcome to do so. :)
> 
> numsym.xpm contains numbers, punctuation, and a few graphics characters.
> The top twelve rows occupy the number 1-9 and zero, ;'[]\-=,./`, space,
> block, 50% block, left-half block, right-half block.  Then, there is a
> blank row of pixels.  The bottom 12 rows contain: !@#$%^&*():"{}|_+<>?~,
> visible space, hollow block, 75% block, left-half 50% block, right-half
> 50% block.  The nongraphic characters came from the same screen capture
> that the English alphabet characters came from.
> 
> All non-graphic characters are 7x12 in a 8x12 character cell.  2 pixels
> are reserved for a descent.  All the graphic characters except for the
> visible space draw in the full 8x12, making them suitable for progress
> bars, activity meters, or whatever.
> 
> If you'd like me to do a GUI font (checkboxes, radio buttons, scroll-
> buttons, various icons, and the like), I can probably hammer one of those
> out fairly quickly, too.
> 
> Let me know what you think!

OK, I finally had a chance to try and look at them.  Only, imagemagick
doesn't seem to want to convert them, and since I'm on a windows
machine at work I can't view them here.

That's OK though.  They look right in text view (did you know that
XPMs are just text files?).  Now I just need to write a scheme parser
to load the XPM files.  I'll go over them in more detail when I can
actually display the files as bitmaps.  But, even mostly correct will
be a huge time saver.

I don't plan to do any GUI elements at this time.  I just want to put
together a proof of concept for how the user would interact with and
use the proposed machine.

I do plan on breaking scheme convention in one maner and that is to
actually use a lamdba instead of the keyword lambda (although that
will work to).  Later implementations in hardware may break more
conventions. 

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd