OTF / TTF versions about spleen HOT 29 CLOSED

TTF-Version currently looks like this in VSCode/Chromium on Ubuntu

As one can see hinting is needed and some glyphs are not unique enough to recognize them (A and R for example are too similar looking).

from spleen.

@kucharskim: You are in luck, I have in fact been working on this again lately, and wrote my own program to do the conversion from BDF files. It seems to solve some issues that the old OTF files had with some characters.

I have a new version up, created from the 8x16 version: https://www.cambus.net/tmp/spleen.otf

On Windows, it should work correctly if you set size to 12 Pt.

Regarding embedding bitmaps in TTF/OTF files, I don't remember the exact details anymore but IIRC, I'm not sure all font renderer implementations support this feature.

from spleen.

So, here is an update.

I have made the initial version of my bdftosfd tool public.

It allows me to generate OTF files automatically from the BDF files, and here are some generated fonts available for testing:

• Spleen 8x16 (Set size to 12 Pt (16 pixels))
• Spleen 16x32 (Set size to 24 Pt (32 pixels))
• Spleen 32x64 (Set size to 48 Pt (64 pixels))

If there are no major issues, those fonts will be part of the next Spleen release.

from spleen.

@kucharskim Thanks for the update, that's one less thing to investigate then :-) I released 1.6.0 earlier this month with an OTF version created from the 8x16 version. I will see in the future about eventually providing OTF versions for other sizes as well.

from spleen.

Thank you for the work, Frederic!

from spleen.

So it's been two weeks and I haven't heard of any issues with the OTF fonts, so I also generated a 12x24 version, and released Spleen 1.7.0 which has pregenerated versions in the release tarball.

Thanks to everyone who tested the experimental fonts.

from spleen.

Would love this as well!

from spleen.

Started vectorization here: https://github.com/dunkelstern/spleen/tree/feature/ttf-version

Just a start, will work on this over the next days. Upper and lowercase alphabet has been started, but there is optimization potential obviously.

from spleen.

@dunkelstern Great job so far! Will keep an eye on your repo :)

from spleen.

Done some hinting, this is how it looks on VSCode/Windows now:

Please try the generated TTF font in the ttf-subdir. Currently supports Latin1 and Powerline characters (untested). Tell me if you want more.

Currently i am thinking about supporting some coding-ligatures and the Unicode Box-Drawing set, but that's a lot of work :)

from spleen.

@dunkelstern Looks amazing! But I can't use it on Linux :( I moved it to /usr/share/fonts, like I do with all fonts, but it doesn't show up in system settings, nor in other apps.

from spleen.

I just dropped it in /home/<user>/.local/share/fonts and it showed up... weird, perhaps some caching issue? I would try to run fc-cache -v as user and root, perhaps it shows up then?

from spleen.

@dunkelstern Nope, still doesn't show up :/ Using KDE Plasma 5.14 on Solus (Linux). Like I said: other fonts that I move to /usr/share/fonts show up fine, so it can't be a configuration issue.

Edit: it does show up when I move it to ~/.local/share/fonts, very strange :/

from spleen.

I converted the BDF to TTF. It is a cheat because the TTF simply embeds the bitmaps. Kinda suit my need at the moment though.

from spleen.

It does not work on my setup: only a-z A-Z letters are printed on the screen

from spleen.

It does not work on my setup: only a-z A-Z letters are printed on the screen

So what's your setup like? I can't help you with anything without knowing anything...

from spleen.

It does not work on my setup: only a-z A-Z letters are printed on the screen

So what's your setup like? I can't help you with anything without knowing anything...

Hello,
I am running Solus OS.
I installed Spleen by downloading the file ttf/SpleenMedium.ttf of you pull request. Then I installed it using gnome-font-viewer. Then chose it as font in visual Studio Code.
Here is a simple a "Hello, world!" written in C.
The result is similar using other text editors and terminals (tested on alacritty, gedit and tilix).

Tell me if you want more informations.

from spleen.

Working fine here on Solus. But I don't use Visual Studio Code.

from spleen.

What would be the intended use case for a TTF or OTF version?

from spleen.

My current IDE, JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA, does not support bitmap fonts. So right now I cheat, as mentioned above.

from spleen.

@Vistaus What IDE are you using ?

from spleen.

@josephscade hm seems you got an older version where only those characters were implemented, please try downloading it from my branch not from the pull request directly.

from spleen.

@fcambus @namn Exactly my problem, using PyCharm, VSCode and some other Electron Apps that can only use TTF/OTF not the Bitmap variants

from spleen.

@dunkelstern I appreciate your efforts on this. The TTF file you created looks similar to Spleen 32x64 when opened in a font editor and/or used in this size, but on your screenshots where it is used in smaller sizes, it doesn't. So it means Spleen needs one OTF/TTF file per size, and vectorizing glyphes manually is not going to scale, it also means that each time I modify the BDF files, I also have to modify the .sfd files.

As others have pointed out, OTF/TTF files can be exported in FontForge, but with the caveat that they are embedding bitmaps. This is not optimal either.

I have been working on automatic OTF/TTF generation directly from the BDF files, and it produces vectorized versions for each size. While there are still some issues, I believe the generated files are now ready for wider testing.

OTF files are available for the 8x16 and 16x32 versions.

from spleen.

Is it ok if I fork and try to develop further it on my own? I would change the name and keep the derivation attribution to spleen and link people back prominently if they want the original pixel fonts.

from spleen.

Thank you for your answer @dunkelstern, you were right!

from spleen.

Hi @fcambus. I'm using spleen font on my OpenBSD systems, but recently I needed to use Windows and I miss a lot your fonts there. My main use case is console/shell access via PuTTY. You provided in your earlier comments links to OTF working copy of your fonts, but they return HTTP 404 now. Do you have any new version of your fonts?

As I'm not familiar with fonts as a subject domain, but have question about following your comment:

As others have pointed out, OTF/TTF files can be exported in FontForge, but with the caveat that they are embedding bitmaps. This is not optimal either.

Why this is not optimal? Your fonts on OpenBSD are bitmap fonts and for console (XTerm in this case) they work like a charm.

from spleen.

@fcambus: I've installed 8x16 OTF font from above URL. I can see it in Windows as available font. A side note, in PuTTY spleen font is not visible by default. However when I select Allow selection of variable-pitch fonts in PuTTY's Appearance settings then I can choose it from the list. I did experiment with different sizes but the font looks nice to me with original size of 8 Pt and that small setting for me is too eye-straining. In XTerm on OpenBSD I use spleen-16x32. Anyway, thanks for working on this and if you need help testing this on Windows, I'm happy to help. Because of small size of the current font version, for now I'm going to stick to different font for everyday work. Cheers.

from spleen.

@fcambus, small details to clarify, why I've seen 8 Pt as visually most appealing. I had in Windows 10 Display settings > Scale and layout size set to 150%. Changing it to 100% indeed makes Spleen looks best with 12 Pt setting. With desktop scale set to 100% and Spleen set to 12 Pt it's actually good for my eyes that I can stick to in PuTTY.

from spleen.