  FONTS for DUMB TERMINALS
  David S. Lawyer
  Nov. 1997

  A brief overview of fonts for dumb terminals.
  ______________________________________________________________________

  Table of Contents

  1. Introduction

  2. Types of Software

  3. Soft-font

  4. Install programs

  5. Developing fonts

  ______________________________________________________________________

  1.  Introduction

  Most dumb terminals today have the capability of displaying user-
  created character sets.  Thus one may use other alphabets than English
  such as Greek, Russian, Japanese or Chinese provided that one can
  obtain the necessary fonts as software.  Note that you only get the
  alphabetic version of Japanese or Chinese.  Also useful are
  mathematical symbols such as the ones used for APL programming.

  Many of the ISO approved character sets use English characters (more
  precisely called Latin characters) for the first 128 characters.  Some
  of these 128 are control codes, digits, or punctuation symbols.  The
  next 128 characters are non-English, although the first 32 of these
  may be additional control codes.  One may thus use such a font for
  both English and one or more non-English languages.  The most common
  font of this type is known as Latin-1.  It includes non-Latin letters
  used in Western European languages and is widely used on the Internet.

  2.  Types of Software

  There are three types of software.  One type is the font itself (soft-
  font), another is a short program or script that installs the font in
  a terminal, and the last is software used to design and modify fonts
  (development).

  3.  Soft-font

  Font which is not built into a terminal is called soft-font.  When one
  sends this code to a terminal over a serial port line, the terminal
  installs (or loads) the font in its memory.  Terminals can usually
  keep a few different fonts in their memory so one may send the
  terminal a certain short code telling it to switch fonts (= select a
  certain font).  When it's selected, typing at the keyboard should
  display the font's characters.

  4.  Install programs

  These do more than just copy the soft-font to a terminal.  It is often
  necessary to send some initial code to set up the terminal the way you
  want it.  You may need to tell the terminal what to name the fonts and
  which "bank" to store it in, etc.  Often an install program will only
  be several lines long and can be written as some type of a script
  (such as a shell-script in a Unix-like system).

  5.  Developing fonts

  There are programs which will let you modify existing fonts and create
  fonts from scratch.  There is a VT200 Toolkit dated 1986 for creating
  fonts on Digital Equipment Corporation's (DEC's) VT series terminals.
  See the file other_font_tools. <other_font_tools.txt>   One written by
  the author is named BitFontEdit and is freeware.  It might be found
  close to this document you are now reading.

