Zugg Software :: View topic

Apprentice Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 132 Location: USA

It appears that the "Terminal" font is no longer available in CMUD. I use it because it is one of the few fixed width fonts that looks really good at small sizes (<10) Not sure why it wouldn't be in the list though.

Posted: Sat Jul 01, 2006 10:48 pm

It looks like Terminal isn't included in XP which I've never noticed before. Use System instead it's pretty much the same.

Apprentice Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 132 Location: USA

I have Terminal available in Zmud on this same machine so either Zmud picks it up from the system or includes it in the package. *shrug*

Posted: Sat Jul 01, 2006 11:05 pm

I know that earlier versions of Windows did font susbstitution and although looking in win.ini and system.ini I can't see any it could be in the registry. I've actually looked in the fonts directory and I cannot see Terminal and as you say on XP with zMUD it shows up and with CMUD it doesn't. You're best bet at this time is to use System as I suggested but this is definitely interesting and I wonder if Zugg or anyone else may be able to shed more light on what is going on here.

Posted: Sat Jul 01, 2006 11:34 pm

As you can see from the search below the Terminal font is nowhere to be seen in XP so a font substitution must be happening somewhere for zMUD to pick the font up and display it.

Apprentice Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 132 Location: USA

Oh trust me it wasn't that I didn't believe you. I was just indicating that the Terminal font was showing in Zmud, but not in Cmud. Maybe a bug or it may not be...*shrug*

Novice Joined: 30 Apr 2006 Posts: 45

Use "ProFont". It looks glorious at 8pt. It's the next best thing to Mishawaka which I haven't found in a long time.

Apprentice Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 132 Location: USA

Well system looks nice, but only goes down to 10pt. I need something that is 6 or 8pt and ProFont is not installed on my system.

Wizard Joined: 03 Mar 2001 Posts: 1127 Location: London

http://www.tobias-jung.de/seekingprofont/

about a third of the way through the page it has download links

Apprentice Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 132 Location: USA

ProFont looks horrible at low pt sizes. The odd thing that I noticed is that terminal.ttf is not found anywhere on my system, but when I put a copy of terminal.ttf that I found on the web in my fonts directory it replaced the orginal terminal with the TTF version. My guess is that whatever system resource that Zmud is pulling the Terminal font from is not also being loaded in Cmud.

Well I'll keep trying to find a nice looking 6pt font. The Terminal.ttf I found has 6pt as an option, but it comes out as being very blurry.

Posted: Wed Jul 05, 2006 8:35 am

Only Zugg will be able to tell you how each program builds it's font list. I wouldn't have thought zMUD has fonts embedded in it or available from some resource file. I'm still betting on a font substitution happening.

Posted: Wed Jul 05, 2006 9:30 am

I've had a bit of a look in the fonts directory and there are loads of .fon files that have odd names but when double clicked on display Terminal as the font. Take a look at app850.fon for instance.

Anyway I've been trying out some fonts and I think that Courier New, Regular, 7 may suit you. It's nice and small but still clear and it's fixed width. 8 is too big and 6 is too small and fuzzy, 7 may well be the one.

Posted: Wed Jul 05, 2006 6:20 pm

Actually, CMUD just calls the built-in Windows Font dialog, and this should be the same dialog as zMUD uses. I don't think anything changed in this code in CMUD so I don't know why it wouldn't list the same fonts, unless it's a change caused by the switch from the Delphi 5 to Delphi 7 compilers.

Actually, if anyone ever finds a really good font that scales well, post a link here. If it was free to distribute and looked really good, I'd be happy to distribute a nice font file with the CMUD installer.

GURU Joined: 24 Sep 2000 Posts: 1237 Location: USA

For programming (monospaced) I like Bitstream Vera Sans Mono - I use it for mudding too. When I ever mud anymore :(

http://www.lowing.org/fonts/ or http://www.lowing.org/fonts/images/Bitstream_Vera_Sans_Mono.gif

It's very readable - no mistaking lowercase L for one, or uppercase O for zero.

Posted: Thu Jul 06, 2006 5:52 pm

Darker, did you make a typo in the link? Looks like the site might be down or gone.

Enchanter Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 698

Those links worked twenty minutes ago.

Wizard Joined: 25 Mar 2003 Posts: 1113 Location: USA

The GIF came up okay, but the fonts listing and even the base domain don't work for me now.

Posted: Thu Jul 06, 2006 6:34 pm

I was just able to get to them again.

Enchanter Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 698

Maybe the hordes of anxious CMUD afficianados took the site down! Laughing

Posted: Thu Jul 06, 2006 7:09 pm

*rofl* perhaps. Like the rest of you I could get through earlier but not now. It did look like a good font though.

Magician Joined: 29 Nov 2005 Posts: 482

http://www.december14.net/fonts.shtml

This will show you the fonts in any case with a link to grab it.

GURU Joined: 24 Sep 2000 Posts: 1237 Location: USA

Figures it would vanish right after I link to it. Here's a couple more samples...

http://www.petefreitag.com/item/351.cfm

http://www.dafont.com/font.php?file=bitstream_vera_mono

Posted: Thu Jul 06, 2006 7:47 pm

Umm, yuck! The font looks ok on some of those web pages, but when I install it into Windows, it seems to be anti-aliased and looks really horrible on my particular monitor. Here is a screenshot:

It seems to look better on my digital monitor vs my analog monitor. But in both cases I could never program using this or any other anti-aliased font. Is there a way to turn off font smoothing for a specific font? All I found is a global setting.

Also, it seems to look a lot better on those example sites that you linked, so it makes me think I'm doing something wrong. My screen resolution is 1152x864 on the monitor that looks the worse.

(I probably shouldn't be spending time on this, but having a better programming font than Courier would help with Delphi in addition to MUDding)

Posted: Thu Jul 06, 2006 7:54 pm

Btw, all of the font samples on the http://www.lowing.org/fonts/ site (which seems to be back up) all point to a font called ter-914n, so you can't really go by any of his font samples. The link http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/6/11739/5249 (thanks for the link Mr_Kent!) seems to have corrected View Sample links for various programming fonts that I'm looking at to see if any others have font smoothing turned off.

Posted: Thu Jul 06, 2006 8:11 pm

OK, I seem to have answered my own question. For fonts that have smoothing enabled, Windows only has a global option. It is found when you right-click the desktop, select Properties, go to the Appearance tab and click the Effects button. However, there are two options in Windows XP for font smoothing: Standard, and ClearType. I found that ClearType seems to work a bit better. Here are three screenshots of the BitStream Vera Mono font with the different Windows smoothing options:

Font Smoothing disabled:

Standard Font Smoothing:

ClearType Font Smoothing:

So, while I might use ClearType smoothing on my computer and switch to the Bitstream Vera Mono font, I'm not sure I can really distribute this as the default CMUD font if it's going to require users to change their global font smoothing option.

What do people think...are there any other options that might be better?