Monday, April 15, 2013

Fixedsys

Draft

Stop using fixedsys already! :-P when i was in the 90's and used mIRC from Windows to connect to IRC networks, the default font used by the program was fixedsys. I really loved it and every time i got my hands in some mIRC script of configuration using another font, the first think I would do was to change the font back to Fixedsys... I needed some time to really understand the power of other fonts and why fixedsys was just messing everything and avoiding me to fully engage in the IRC experience.

In this project I've came across some MUD clients that use fixedsys as their default font... Why oh why are we still using fixedsys as a default font 2013?! Let me say some thing: Fixedsys is not a great font, in fact it's a very bad one, especially for applications that use text to transmit all kind of emotions and environments... The default Fixedsys font didn't even get into the trouble of using all possible character space in the 8bit range...



Happily someone spend lots of time implementing a Unicode version of Fixedsys called Fixedsys Excelsior!
link: http://www.fixedsysexcelsior.com/. unforgettably in my tests it doesn't appear to be a true mono-space font and the version I could use in PuTTY - Fixedsys TTF - don't know if is excelsior - didn't display the block characters correctly. 

Using Unicode UTF8 with Fixedsys TTF

Using Unicode UTF8 with Consolas TTF


Bellow is part of the character map of Fixedsys Excelsior. It should display everything correctly but i think that the Fixedsys font that i used in PuTTY wasn't the excelsior because i couldn't see the excelsior name in the drop down list. 

I think that its because that font isn't a true monospace font (maybe because of some exotic language characters see wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixedsys_Excelsior)

Character map of the 2 versions of Fixedsys Excelsior I have (2.00 and 3.01)



I think i will make a list of recommended fonts and sizes... :P

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