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Author Topic: Linux Text Mode Font  (Read 3593 times)

mikekchar

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Linux Text Mode Font
« on: August 10, 2017, 09:11:26 am »

I was just playing with text mode on Linux tonight and I discovered that Fira Code is a *great* font for Dwarf Fortress.  It's really boxy, so while it's not quite square, it's pretty close.  It has all the glyphs too.  I was playing in a KDE Konsole for a while and so far, I really like it.  I may switch over permanently.
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Fleeting Frames

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Re: Linux Text Mode Font
« Reply #1 on: August 10, 2017, 04:16:42 pm »

Screenshots?

While text mode has an unique use for sshing, both users can make it into a tileset as well.

mikekchar

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Re: Linux Text Mode Font
« Reply #2 on: August 10, 2017, 06:31:04 pm »

You *do* realise that I had to open an Imgur account for this.  I hold you responsible for the consequences :-)

The colours here are my own custom colours (I need more contrast than stock because I have poor vision).  Also you will note the HUGE font.  Also because I have poor vision.  I decided not to change the size of the images just so you can see how nice it looks with antialiased fonts.  Finally the bit at the bottom is tmux :-)  The dwarf fortress colours don't really match up well with my tmux theme...  But it runs flawlessly in tmux, which really surprises me.  I'll probably drag out FontForge and start making my own custom font, but this is a good start.  One small strangeness is that Konsole supports ligatures and Fira Code has many of them, so sometimes the characters are displayed with the ligatures.  Unfortunately, it only happens when the display code decides to render adjacent characters, so it's hit and miss.  If you use a different terminal emulator, you won't have that problem (probably alacritty would work really well with this...)

Main screen
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Top level of my reclaimed worldgen fortress
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Caverns
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Dwarf's feelings
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Edit: I forgot to mention that there is a small bug.  It doesn't seem to understand the console size right when you first start.  If you resize the window, it will adjust after that.

Edit2: Playing a bit more, I just realised that Konsole is not rendering bold fonts for me (it's been like that for AGES, and I never noticed :-) ).  I tried with alacritty (a new console program that I highly recommend if you don't mind getting your hands dirty -- by far the fastest rendering console app, and relatively bug free) and it works better.  I'll post some new screenshots a bit later when I get a chance.

The other important thing I realised is that it is important that in your console app you turn on the setting for "use bright colors for bold", otherwise most of the characters won't render.  It's a bit unfortunate that Toady is using the old standard there, but I can understand it (He probably hasn't touched that code in nearly a decade).

Finally, I've also been playing with the Inconsolata-g font, which I actually like a bit better for some characters, but it's much narrower, so everything is compressed.  I'm very much tempted to make a square font now... Not that I have any time to do so :-(
« Last Edit: August 10, 2017, 08:25:43 pm by mikekchar »
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Fleeting Frames

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Re: Linux Text Mode Font
« Reply #3 on: August 11, 2017, 09:09:05 am »

...Ahahaha. Consequences? I don't have an imgur account, myself! Though I've uploaded few thousand dwarf fortress pics to it :P

Few can handle darkblue in in particular stock well :) All custom colors.txt adjust it.

As for the pictures...Yeah ok, wow, that's pretty silky smooth, though I fear it'll be lost on smaller views. Eyeballing it, looks like 16x × 22y tile size. I myself prefer to have tileset small enough to fit at least 1x1 embark on my laptop screen (current 14x14 just fits 2x1 if I hide menus).

For quickly sharing as non-TEXT tileset, there's mifki's Tool to generate text tilesets.
« Last Edit: August 11, 2017, 09:11:06 am by Fleeting Frames »
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