Good bitmap fonts with big sizes and unicode support

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I really like bitmap fonts for programming/terminal. As far as I know there are two bitmap fonts with good unicode support:

The problem is that I have a really high resolution screen, and they're both too small. Fixed does include a large size (10x20) but it looks really bad (it's basically always bold, and bold is a different face).

Are there any other bitmap fonts with unicode support and large sizes? Terminus is the only font with a decent size but it doesn't have good unicode support. Having good coverage for mathematical symbols would be enough, since that's what I need.

bitonic

Posted 2012-03-17T14:10:02.060

Reputation: 73

Question was closed 2014-05-22T16:16:48.037

1Come now, moderators; bitmap fonts stay unchanged for decades. The answers are unlikely to become outdated quickly. – Ed Avis – 2015-01-05T11:10:42.450

Answers

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My UW ttyp0 has about 3000 Unicode characters, including a number of stylistic variants (plain, dotted or slashed zero, centered or raised asterisk, visible or invisble NBSP, etc.). I don't know which symbols you're looking for; math coverage is clearly not complete, but it may be sufficient for your needs. APL and Z notation are not covered, though. Sizes range from 6x11 to 11x22 in regular, bold, and some italic. Currently it's only .bdf/.pcf (that is, the X11 bitmap format); if you need .fon or some other font format, you'll have to convert it yourself (it's free software).

Uwe

Posted 2012-03-17T14:10:02.060

Reputation: 1 043

1You font is really beautiful and useful, thanks for your work and sharing. Related to your statement about if you need .fon: could you provide some hints how to convert your font to .fon, please? (and name some tools, both win and nix are good). TYIA. – ArtM – 2013-03-02T19:34:28.010

There is a bdf2fon tool at github, but I've never used it. If I remember correctly, fontforge can also convert to fon. – Uwe – 2013-03-05T18:02:59.277

Unfortunately, it can't produce a valid result. bdf2fon is composed of 2 apps: bdf2fnt and fnt2fon. When running bdf2fnt it stops with the error can't parse line ENCODING 256. It seems everything is limited to 255 chars. Something similar I get from FontForge when performing Generate fonts: a small 5kb .fon file as output with only 255 chars. Any ideas how to bypass this 255 limit? or maybe even better if a specification of the FON format could be found and I'll be able to write an app for this purpose. – ArtM – 2013-03-05T19:10:51.857

According to the spec for .fnt, which can be found for instance at http://www.undocprint.org/formats/font_formats, there is indeed a hard-coded limit: It says that the character codes of the first and the last character in the font are stored as bytes (that is, 0 to 255). So fnt/fon works only for 8-bit code pages. Can you convert it to a bitmap-only .ttf using fontforge instead?

– Uwe – 2013-03-05T23:13:25.657

FON can use more than 255 chars for sure (at least Terminus is one example, ~880 chars, and it also has BDF files). About bitmap-only .ttf: I select (faked) MS bitmap only.., then I get the warning ..font contains no glyphs wiht unicode encoding, then I get a ~75kb .ttf which can't be open/used by the OS, but the font extensio tool says Ttyp0 Medium contains 2936 glyphs and no standard kern pairs. This font includes embedded bitmaps.

– ArtM – 2013-03-07T10:49:29.850

Thanks! It is missing some characters I need but it's the best thing around anyway. – bitonic – 2013-04-12T10:33:13.607

Which ones do you need in addition? – Uwe – 2013-04-12T11:14:22.743

Asked: 2012-03-17T14:10:02.060

Viewed: 7 897 times

Active: 2014-05-22T11:33:37.733