One Font to Rule Them All

Way back in the olden times (9 months ago?) I tried to use weechat on z2lite.  I lasted about a minute before my eyes squealed in agony.  It was setup by default to use a microscopic font in order to squeeze as much information onto the tiny zipit screen as possible.  Now I understand.  I've been fiddling with various IRC and IM text apps for a week or so now, trying to see which, if any, I can cram into the jffs.  In order to provide more utility than the basic pmirc script they all seem to need the box drawing characters and plenty of screen real estate.

IZ2S 2.05 (enhanced) comes with a really nice 6x10 font that gives you 24 lines and 53 columns on the zipit screen.  It's not quite a full xterm, but it's a nice readable compromise.  Unfortunately it only comes with the basic ASCII char set.  No frills.  All the rest of the glyphs in the 256 char font are hideous useless squiggles.  A while ago fellow IZ2S zipit user dronz dug up some nice 8 wide fonts complete with box drawing characters and a full set of Western European glyphs to go along with his European keymap for the zipit keyboard.  I've used these a bit (mostly for the box chars) and they work well enough for the alsamixer, but 8 wide glyphs only give you 40 columns across the zipit screen.  Not quite enough room for chatting and a buddy list.

The microscopic font has the box drawing characters, but again, my eyes!  I searched the internet, far and wide, for the perfect linux console font.  And I found some candidates, but nothing that truely satisfied.  Ok, in the dark and distant past, I've been known to roll my own homebrew font to squeeze as much as possible onto the tiny screens of yesteryear.  So I dug around for some sort of console font editor.  What I found was also a blast from the past.  The nafe font editor dumps the font to a text file with the glyphs drawn in Xs and spaces.  Then you edit the glyphs with a text editor (emacs) and a lot of squinting.  I also discovered the cse font editor (which I haven't tried yet, but I did try his nethack font) and gbdfed, which I used to import my partially finished psf font file and display the glyphs at actual size.  I could've used it to edit the glyphs, but I'm pretty comfortable with emacs.  However, I did also use gbdfed to display the 8x10 font from dronz as something of a guide for my new 6x10 glyphs.  When the new glyphs were complete I used psfgettable to fetch the unicode mapping table from the Western European font and psfaddtable to paste it onto my new font.  So it should support all the same unicode chars, including the box bits.  The results are simply fabulous!

I finally got the rhapsody IRC client to fit ok on the zipit screen.  It's about 140K, which is not too shabby for the additional features it gives you over the no frills pmirc script.  The new font should also do wonders for the naim IM and IRC client, if it works.  I built the new experimental code with lua scripting and OSCAR protocol support, but I still have some config details to work out.

Meanwhile on the #zipit IRC channel dronz pointed out some online gateways for IM and email that appear to work with retawq.  Good idea.  I dug up my old mobile links homepage that I created for netsurf and reworked it as the default homepage for retawq on the jffs, including a link the the retawq help pages.  Reading the help documentation made me realize that retawq can be scripted to substitute for wget or curl.   So I quickly dashed off a one line "wget" script that seems to work well enough for simple downloads.  You still need the busybox upgrade to download and unzip things.  Gotta remember to make better use of the goodies I've already loaded onto the jffs.

It may take a day or two to release all the goodies for this post.  Just as I finished the photography portion of this post, dronz sent me a bunch of new scripts, fonts, and config files that I need to sort out and merge into my stuff.  To get the ball rolling, here's nethack, rhapsody IRC, and the new font for IZ2S.

nethack-iz2s.zip
rhapsody-irc-iz2s.zip
iz2slat-font.zip

And here's a pic of nethack with the new IZ2S font loaded and the DEC character set selected from the nethack option menu.  Check out those nice smooth walls...

 I'm still working on the code for the really fancy nethack font.