RE: Amazing Discovery (to me)

[Robert Holmgren holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

Douglas Beeson:

These OEM "Terminal" fonts (in WOAFON14.ZIP) are a gas. Truly an amazing
discovery by you. The more amazing because it seems like such a needle in a
haystack: I ploughed through most of the MSWindows fonts at a mirror site
of ftp.cica.indiana.edu about 15 months ago, and I found nothing. Other
purported "MS-DOS under Windows" fonts simply don't work. There is
something peculiar about the header for these bitmapped fonts that makes
them different -- I suspect it wouldn't be hard to figure it all out;
it must be documented somewhere, and then you could probably adapt a
lot of existing screen fonts to the format; but I thought it was
interesting, and an acknowledgment of the oddity of these things, that
the author of the WOAFON14 fonts (a well-known Windows wonk) says
he copied the header from IBM's 8514OEM.FON. That means it ain't
obvious.

Apart from VGAOEM.FON (and 8514OEM.FON, of course), I know of one other
Terminal font that works. It's IBM's 8515OEM.FON, which I acquired several
years ago as part of XGAWIN21.ZIP, and is in a lot of repositories. This
is a BIG font, for people with glasses I guess... bigger than anything in
WOAFON14. To give you an idea, an 80 column width just about fills up the
screen in XyWin. I kinda like it. My eyes are really deteriorating.

You would suppose, with the OEM appellation, that every video board
manufacturer supplies their own Terminal fonts. But I think its not
the case. I logged on to a couple of boards yesterday -- ATI, Matrox --
and nada. Anybody who has a likely-looking *OEM.FON font on disk should
try it out!



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Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
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