[HECnet] Downloadble fonts into an VT220?

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2013-09-18 10:23, Sampsa Laine wrote:



If you're looking for real world examples then Google is your friend.   There is a program floating around that converts gifs to sixel graphics that can be displayed using the soft character set on VT320 terminals.

Regards, Tim.

Yup, I converted some GIFs using NETPBM to Sixel graphics.

I wish there was a Mac or Windows terminal emulator capable of showing them..


Did you checkout VTstar?   That runs on Windows.   Although I'm not sure of the latest version it will work on.   I believe it works with Vista.   Here is the link anyway:


Sadly it doesn't work either. I'm tempted to write some kind of shim that would capture ReGIS / Sixel escape sequences and draw them on Terminal.app.

The protocols are pretty simple.

To point out a few (maybe obvious) things.
Sixel graphics is not the same as soft fonts. Soft fonts are defined in a very sixel-like format, but you cannot get a sixel graphics image and display it on such a terminal.

The soft fonts do indeed differ between the terminals. There are some limited backward compatibility between them, but that is best left alone. The differences are pretty much just a question of different resolution, or size of the character cell if you want to put it that way.
Also, I think a couple of extra parameters were added to the escape sequence along the way, but nothing really significant.

The OS do not really have to do anything in relation to this. It's just like any other font on the terminal. You can switch between them using escape sequences, and the OS is none the wiser.

I've designed fonts for pretty much all VT models, in both 80 and 132 column format. I did this for the Z-machine font, which I used with my Z-machine emulator when playing Beyond Zork.

And so, yes, I have a font editor. This have been mentioned before on the list. It can be found at MIM::DU:[FED]. Written in C (not by me originally], converted to DECUS C, and adapted to handle most VT models. Free to play with if people want...

	Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                                   || "I'm on a bus
                                                                  ||   on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se                         ||   Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                                         ||   tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol