Post by Fred Bednarski in Graphic/UI design feedback.

Viewing post in Graphic/UI design feedback.

Ok, I will work on the font tonight, hopefully have it done by the end of the weekend.

One quick question. Do all the letters need to be six pixels wide? Normally, the 8bit fonts (atari 400/800, c64, Apple][ and so on) had a varied width and set height (as seen here here). To keep the font readable, it would be best if we could use varied font width. It all depends on how are you coding it. I can provide you with a table of widths for each symbol, so they can be rendered with correct spacing.

If you are using a ttf or otf I can just do the spacing in the font file.

As for the other things. I think making your own (or at least tweaking the DB16) would make the games/system more recognizable.

As for scaling the window. I would love either a key combo or a parameter to run the program at 200 or 300% size of what it normally runs. Tweaking the window size by hand each time you run TIC is a little fiddly.

I will respond to the rest of your post later, it was a busy day for me and I want to get cracking on the font.

Nesbox7 years ago (5 edits)

Example to show how TIC render font

Every letter takes 6x6 pixels place, it's necessary for the code editor (usually all the code editors have monospace font).

So, this is a problem we can't change letters width :(

EDIT:

I'll try to make a demo with varied font width in the code editor soon and we decide then

EDIT2:

So, I've made a demo with varied width font, you can test it here https://nesbox.itch.io/tic-test?secret=E1qg7kuahPg...

Fred Bednarski7 years ago (3 edits)

I have tested the varied font width and it works awesome!

With that in mind, I have started to revise the font. I fixed the lowercase x and tweaked some lowercase letters. The 5x4 size is a bit limitting, so the we don't have enough space for a counter in lowercase e or adding more heft to the lowercase i (as it is, a dot and a dash makes it look more inline with the other lowercase letters, previously it looked shorter).

For the uppercase I have decided to add a bit of chunkiness to their form. It is inspired by both Atari 8bit computers and early gameboy fonts. This will make the text altogether, but especially all uppercase, will be much more pleasing to the eye. The added width made M,T, W & Y a full 6 pixels wide, while I & L are now 4 pixels wide. I think it will balance the overall line width, especially with the lowercase letters being 4 pixels wide at most. (I am not sure how your text width function work, but I guess just reading where the "white" text pixel are and adding a blank pixel to the right for monospacing and making text read well.

Let me know what you think and see if that would work. I started working on the numbers, but I will look at the symbols, but I think those are already pretty good, needing maybe little TLC. I am thinking of making the punctuation symbols (. , ; :) a little thinker, because they are quite important for code.

edit: now with chunkier lowercase!

HomineLudens7 years ago

Despite the big effort from level27geek I'm not totally convinced by this font. It looks awesome rounded and pleasant but when it comes to write and read code I feel better with the original one. It's also impossible to regular indent even simple variables assignation. Maybe the colors or contrast is also playing an important role in the final result in the Code Editor.

That's just my thought.

http://pasteboard.co/mRXbDvXVv.png

Nesbox7 years ago

I like new font, it's stylish and looks pretty well, only one thing I find hard to accept is that font isn't monospace.