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Since I switched to Mac OS X & Terminal.app I have started using UTF-8 code-page for all my terminal sessions; Mac local and Linux/UNIX remote.

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.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 20th, 2008 at 13:14 and is filed under Tweaks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.