Suggestion: replace main font with a font that is more readable

[xandark]

As a matter of clarity, I really like the font that Catalyst uses for half of the interface because the glyphs are readable to my eyes, especially given the fringing nature of the display.

For example, there appears to be only one DHGR pixel between glyphs, which makes it a challenge to read on anything but a true monochrome monitor. Also, the inner space of the o, u, e, n, p, g letters barely register any whitespace.

Here's a comparison:

I looked at all of the fonts in the a2d Fonts folder. The one that appears closest the Catalyst main font is the Mousepaint font.

Would it be possible to see what that looks like as the main inteface font for a2d? And add an extra pixel for the inter-glyph spacing?

The Mousepaint font seems to be the closest to the original Mac font.

Or possibly lift the font directly from Catalyst?

[xandark]

Yeah, I changed my a2d desktop to blue.

[eric-ja]

Can you post a link to the catalyst font? I'll give a go at converting it.

[inexorabletash]

FWIW the current system font is 7 pixels wide including the kerning. MGTK supports "normal" fonts (up to 7 pixels) and "wide" fonts (up to 14 pixels). Using a wider font would slow rendering and double the memory size of the font. Also, I don't think optimizing for color displays is worth the time.

That said, if you build DeskTop yourself I can provide pointers for how to swap the font. It's not easy - the font width and height are hardcoded in more places than I'd like, and dialog layouts are all authored assuming a particular font size. I've always wanted to see A2D running with something like Susan Kare's Chicago, though!

As far as creating a font (thanks @eric-ja !), the easiest thing to do is create a text file illustrating the glyphs and use the bin/make_font.pl tool to create the binary version. I've attached dumps (via bin/dump_font.pl) of some examples:

Font-MousePaint.txt
Font-System-EN.txt
Font-Toronto.txt

[xandark]

I've extracted what I imagine to be Catalyst's system font because I found a file on the disk called just that. I'll add the disk image here too.

SYSTEM.FONTS#040200.zip

CATALYST.3.0 800k disk.zip

[xandark]

@inexorabletash Very interesting, okay, although the drawing speed in Catalyst seems pretty fast to me, and it does some drawing optimizations like not using the painters algorithm to redraw windows. Overall, it is the speed champ.

[xandark]

@inexorabletash looking at the Font-System.EN.txt file that you shared, I can see that there is space to widen out a lot of the narrow interiors of some of the lowercase fonts, like the o:

== 0x6f ==
......
......
.###..
##.##.
##.##.
##.##.
.###..
......
......

If the glyphs can be 7px wide, then there's room to widen out the interior of these narrow letters by one more pixel. But as you say, it's a pointless exercise at this moment because as you say, "dialog layouts are all authored assuming a particular font size".

[inexorabletash]

If the glyphs can be 7px wide, then there's room to widen out the interior of these narrow letters by one more pixel.

The dialogs have some slop because localized strings are usually longer. I don't relish a full pass to fix widths, but it is doable. I am partial to the current quirky appearance, though.

I did a quick pass to make some of the 1px interiors 2px just to see how it looks. Before:

After:

[eric-ja]

Here's the catalyst font in MGTK format - use it in place of a2d.font (or whatever).

It's nice but noticeably less space-efficient.
catalyst.font.zip

[xandark]

@inexorabletash "I did a quick pass to make some of the 1px interiors 1px just to see how it looks."... I really like the fonts in the "after" screen, it's much more readable to my eyes. The letters, like the o don't look so vertically compressed.

@eric-ja Wow! Cool!

[xandark]

I am partial to the current quirky appearance, though.

Could we put it to a community vote to see what the overall feeling is on this?

[inexorabletash]

Here's the Catalyst font - looks like the conversion ran into some issues, @eric-ja

[xandark]

Still, I really like how the glyphs look, it's very readable to my eyes. Lots of interior "light" in the enclosed loops. I even like their Apple glyph.

I could imagine that the borked glyphs be manually tweaked based on looking at the video of Catalyst.

[xandark]

The lowercase a has a more appealing form as well.

[eric-ja]

Oops! Some of the chars are 9 pixels wide, which requires that the MGTK font be structured as double-width.

Try this one.
catalyst-dw.font.zip

[inexorabletash]

Thanks @eric-ja !

Here's a quick shot of DeskTop with the Catalyst font - the special glyphs are different so lots of things are wacky, but you can get a taste

(I need to fix MGTK to paint the updated title bars paint properly with an 8px font.)

[buserror]

I rather like it; but isn't some of the advance a bit wonkyu? I'm looking a Q-uit for example -- seems the 'advance' should be one pixel less than the width of that glyph, perhaps it is not supported by the drawing code?

[eric-ja]

I didn't see anything that was obviously a kerning table in the file xandark uploaded. It could be hard-coded in the catalyst code (haven't looked at all at that.)

[inexorabletash]

This was a glitch in @eric-ja 's conversion - I fixed the version that was checked in, after I made the screenshot.

MGTK fonts are quirky. They can be one or two bytes wide, but only 7 bits of each byte are used, and the width is off-by-one for double-wide fonts. So e.g. if a character is 7 pixels wide it will be encoded as "11111110" (LSB on the left) and the width table contains 7, but if it's 8 pixels wide it will be encoded as "11111110 10000000" and the width table contains 8 not 9 even though it looks like 9 bits are used.

The latter quirk caused any characters wider than 7 pixels (like the Q) to have an extra pixel of padding.

[xandark]

I love this, this is fascinating, bringing a font from one rival desktop to another, ha. And I also really like the readability of the font as well; there's plenty of "daylight" in the interior of the lowercase glyphs. I'm thinking that if the unnecessary control-code glyphs are removed, then the file size would be reduced.

[inexorabletash]

if the unnecessary control-code glyphs are removed

It doesn't work that way, alas - MGTK fonts have glyphs from 0 to some maximum index, so you'll always have 0..31 for the CC range.

But also: DeskTop uses many of those for rendering things like menu check marks, Apple modifiers, arrows, and so on, so they're not "free".

[inexorabletash]

Here's a screenshot with the corrected Catalyst font (but still without the symbol glyphs):

In the other extreme, here's a screenshot with standard font, but with the b and d glyphs made skinny like e, o, p, q and so on:

[xandark]

I mean, it's close in these synthetic emulation screenshots where every pixel is perfect, but I keep coming back to the rounder, more open quality of the Catalyst font, it's more readable to me.

[inexorabletash]

it's close in these synthetic emulation screenshots where every pixel is perfect

FWIW, I find the current system font very readable on real displays as well, either monochrome CRT or color LCD with monochrome via one of many options (Laser 128 mono switch, IIgs mono composite output, IIc w/ VGA adapter, IIe with A2VidGA adapter).

But typography is very, very subjective.