as it so often is, it's time to do crimes against typography with pixel fonts
1
Discussion
Loading...
I need to copy a font off my windows 98 machine to my Raspberry Pi's framebuffer application.
obviously the way to do this is to just render out every character the font supports to bitmaps and then import those as spritesheet
2
@foone Very silly question, does Windows 98 not use true type fonts? or does Linux not like Windows 98's version of true type?
1
@Canageek Windows 98 supports true type fonts, but this isn't one of them. This is a bitmap font, in the FON format.
I could use some font tools to turn it into a TTF, but that involves vectorizing the pixels and there's no way to be sure they get rendered back out to the same pixels at the other end. So doing my own thing is easier
1
based on file metadata, I've been trying to do this since April, and I think every time I've opened a text editor to write the simple python script I need, someone has messaged me on discord
1
fine I'll close discord and just be offline for an hour
and someone walks into my bedroom asking about help finding a cable
1
okay I generated it
and the part from April is wrong, and I need to fix it on Windows 98. DAMN IT
1
I'm glad Pillow now has .get_flattened_data to match .getdata, especially since neither of them do what I want, and have never done what I want
1
future foone:
it's Image.tobytes() that you want
1
~54 more replies (not shown)
okay I have the font imported and a very simple (no wrapping or newline handling) text engine:
1
THIS IS THE WRONG FONT (SIZE)
1
I've extracted MS Sans Serif 10 point. I need MS Sans Serif 8 point.
1
every day is a good day to pull out Visual C++ 6.0!
2
just kidding, I've already crashed the OS in that screenshot. The cursor switched to the text cursor and is stuck that way, you can't click anything
2
oh no, I need unicode support
in windows 98
I need unicows
1
oh good there's an open source replacement, OpenCow:
https://opencow.sourceforge.net/
2
I do not recall how you do ASCII/Unicode dual-use source code. There's some macro you gotta wrap around your string literals, I seem to remember
1
oh here's some info on how to use it:
and look, it was written by the late Michael Kaplan.
2
the secret macro is _T("foobar") which'll do nothing in ASCII mode, but if _UNICODE is defined, it turns "foobar" into "unicode", by which they mean UCS-2
1
I copy-pasted UNICOWS.DLL into C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM which of course crashed Explorer, because Windows 98
1
I still don't have UNICOWS.LIB and it may be a pain to get it
2
I think I can maybe get it from the Windows 😜 Platform SDK? Lets see if I can still get to it on a Windows 98 system.
1
oh goody you have to install everything and win98 can't run the MSIs
1
I do not currently have a local 😜 VM
1
okay it won't work. I think the API I'm using is not supported on win9x. I could check the docs but they pretend 😜 was the first windows
2
ok I went and remoted into another computer and used the 😜 compiler over there and got it done. I could have done this at the beginning but I was stubborn
1
ugh except this is ALMOST right.
The problem is: this is XP's MS Sans Serif, not Windows 98's.
Yeah they changed it a lot, mainly adding a bunch more characters for better language support.
1
I wonder if anyone has done a page showing
1. which fonts are included on windows
2. how they've changed over time
1
okay so the function call that I need that's missing from Windows 98 is called GetFontUnicodeRanges.
And the MSDN docs on my visual studio 6.0 discs does talk about it, but this is neat: it's a preliminary doc!
1
And here's the compatibility matrix!
NT needs 5.0, Windows 9x/me is unsupported, and CE is unsupported. You can't do this on your HP Jornada 720.
1
This is Visual Studio 6.0, which came out in 1998, so Windows 2000 and Windows 😜 don't exist yet. The latest available NT is NT4.
2
I love the 90s-ness of "here's system call: you can't use this for two more years"
1
so, which will be less pain: hacking a replacement for this function call, or fucking up an 😜 machine's fonts by overwriting its copy of MS Sans Serif with the Windows 98 one?
2
lets fuck up an 😜 VM! that might be amusing to see
1
okay wait, I'm a fool: The font isn't different, this is a different font.
"Microsoft Sans Serif" and "MS Sans Serif" are two different fonts. obviously.
2
Got it. I now have MS Sans Serif 8pt as a pseudo-deathgenerator font, and it's pixel identical to the Windows 98 text renderer.
1
now... wordwrapping...
1
the last 4 hours may have been a diversion to not have to think about wordwrapping.
I mean, I guess python has a wordwrap module built in I can just use that, it'll be decent-enough.
1
no I can't use it because it assumes fixed width characters!
1
I could modify the built in python module wordwrap:
https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/main/Lib/textwrap.py
or I could port the JS/TS algorithm I already have in the Death Generator.
but that one is, uh, Not Simple.
1