After few months spent with Apple’s Monaco font, unfortunately not in Monaco, and few hours of fighting with FontForge I have finally made up great bitmap 9×18 font for my terminal.

(Using new Fixed font with 18pt size with vertical spacing set to 0.80, no antialiasing)

Here is my story… First I have used famous Monaco Apple font, which was doing really great. However I have noticed that while on normal ANSI session of mc (Midnight Commander) Monaco‘s box drawing is OK, while on UTF mc (ncurses) are using UNICODE box drawing characters (0×2500) which look awful with Monaco, the reason is that vertical box lines are not continuos divided by line spacing.

Since anyway I don’t use antialiasing in the terminal, I have started looking for perfect bitmap console font that contains maximum number of UNICODE ranges (including my Polish characters), and I have found great X11 font package by Markus Kuhn at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs-fonts.html

I have used FontForge (from MacPorts) to produce following dfonts below.

Download

• FixedMedium.dfont 2008-06-20, 312 KB, Fixed medium bitmap font sizes: 13, 14, 15, 18
• FixedBold.dfont 2008-06-20, 64 KB, Fixed bold bitmap font sizes: 13, 14, 15, 18

License

You are free to use, distribute or modify fonts provided here. I disclaim any warranties with regard to this font. This work is derieved from UCS fonts available from Markus Kuhn at: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs-fonts.html

Important

In order to have continuos vertical line drawing with this Fixed font you need to reduce vertical line spacing to ~0.80 (as for 18pt size) in Terminl.app font settings.

How to fix that ?

It is possible to fix that with any good Resource Editor. Follow the recipe to get rid of popping up JavaScript error:

1. Close all Internet Explorer windows.
2. Locate and extract IE Dev Toolbar JavaScript source using any resource editor. Open C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar\IEDevToolbar.dll and extract resource TXT/235/1033 (type/resource ID/resource language). I used Resource Extractor extension of Total Commander. Alternatively you can use XN Resource Editor. I didn’t use Resource Hacker for this because it was saving the resource as hex-dump rather than binary file.
3. Modify extracted JavaScript source 235.bin using any text editor. Locate function:

   function ParseDoc(doc)
       {
           var aRules = GatherRulesFromDoc(doc);
           collSelectors = parser.Parse(aRules);
   
           // Set quirks mode if necessary
           if("BackCompat" == doc.compatMode)
           {
               for(var i = 0; i < collSelectors.Count; i++)
               {
                   collSelectors.item(i).SetQuirksMode(true);
               }
           }
   
       }

   Change red marked line into:

   try { collSelectors.item(i).SetQuirksMode(true); } catch(e) {}

4. Save back the resource file 235.bin into TXT/235/1033 of IEDevToolbar.dll. I used “replace” function of Resource Hacker.

Now you should have fixed IEDevToolbar.dll, that is not raising any errors anymore.

Note

Please don’t ask me about any binaries as it is against EULA of IE Dev Toolbar.