Today, I've been spending a lot of time on testing different fonts and
colors and stuff. I do that every 6 months or so.
At the end of the day, I am *always* going back to Terminus-Font and a
black terminal. Anything else is crap. Bright terminals are crap. TTF
fonts are crap.
Bright terminals are crap because they break so many applications.
They all assume that you have a dark terminal. Or, even worse, they
explicitly set a dark background. (Some of my own programs do that,
too.) This just sucks.
Contrast sucks on bright terminals. CAD programs all have a dark
background, a lot of professional audio programs have a dark
background. All for a good reason: High contrast.
TTF fonts are crap because they make you think you have bad eyesight.
See, we've been using CRT monitors for years and now we *finally* have
sharp TFT monitors. Why not use a *sharp* font then? Why use blurry
"anti aliased" fonts?
Maybe TTF fonts look good on screens with really high resolutions. 300
dpi or more. But what do we have gained then? We need a hell lot of
pixels just to get sharp fonts. Well, bitmap fonts are sharp in the
first place.
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Some glyphs are missing in Terminus-Font. This has been bothering me
for quite some time. Now, I've finally took the time to study how the
Terminus package is built. Surprisingly, it's pretty simple: You can
edit the BDF files (human readable and easily patchable) using
something like gbdfed[1] and convert them to PCF files (compiled --
not patchable) using a converter tool shipped with Xorg. That's it.
Terminus adds a little more magic but not a lot.
This is really easy. Now, whenever I encounter a missing glyph, I can
add it to Terminus. Nice!
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1.
http://sofia.nmsu.edu/~mleisher/Software/gbdfed/
