Topic: I made a font, and I want CrunchBang's opinions.
edit: Massive updates. Check it out!
Hi. I'm here, more or less, because I do everything el_koraco tells me to do. I'm not sure why, but it's worked out ok so far. Whether or not it actually sticks is another matter. He told me to use scrotwm, and I did, and I loved it, and for some reason I'm on herbstluftwm now instead, but that is also wonderful. Anyway, he told me to start using bitmap fonts so I could fit more on my screen. I hated them all, so I created my own, for which el_koraco gave many suggestions early on that have made the whole thing much slicker (I'm still being stubborn about the braces, however). Other people have also had helpful things to say. Sander17 at UF and the Arch Linux Forum encouraged me to host it on GIT and he manages an AUR package for it now. Doomicide from here and Arch is also using the font at the moment (or was the last time I saw his screens), and gave a few very helpful opinions about character shapes.
Anyway, for a number of reasons, el_koraco told me to come here, and I always do what he says. I lurked for a bit, and found that everyone's screenshots looked like mine (which is probably also the result of el_koraco telling me what to do), and more importantly (for this project) this board has the highest density of bitmap-font users that I've seen anywhere on the net, which makes it a good places to get opinions on my font before I bump it to 1.0
Anyway, the font is called bitocra. It's a smal, clear bitmap font in the spirit of the OCR-A type-face, with many modifications due to the format, and others just because I thought they looked cool. bitocra-full is an extended version that contains tons of weird Latin characters and Hebrew. There are two versions because bitocra-full doesn't play nice as an X core font, but normal bitocra does.
Screenshot:
You are seeing: a bash script (mine), some C++ in gedit (with gtk 3, part of the source for herbstluftwm), a sample text with all of characters and some test-phrases for various languages, a bit of a seminar paper I'm working in with asciidoc markdown, some Hebrew text, another GTK widget, and cowsay. Conky is also there at the top. It is probably the skinniest conky in history.
I'm looking for opinions mostly about specific characters, especially on characters not used in English, since I don't end up using them too often (that goes double for those non-Wester European languages). General critiques like "too small" or "too boxy" are valid, but they aren't likely to have a huge impact. The size and general feel of the font are by design. Due to many requests, I also have a larger version in the works, and that will be the focus once I'm satisfied that the current size is finished. "No Cyrillic" is a very valid criticism, but I'm not really qualified to work on it, unfortunately. There haven't been any requests about it either, so it's just my own conscience being hyper-sensitive about being an ethnocentric American bastard.
The "official" version is in my github repo with the license and readme, but I have a slightly fresher version here with some suggestions from doomicide incorporated (this is pictured version). What I really need is a dev branch and a stable branch on github, but I tried to this, and I failed (I made a new branch, but I had trouble getting commits on it). Thoughts on that are welcome as well. I have no idea what I'm doing when it comes to this stuff.
Last edited by ninjaaron (2011-11-24 06:51:32)
) I'm hooked on it and all other fonts now look too, well, round.
