Unscii
Posted26 days agoActive21 days ago
viznut.fistoryHigh profile
informativepositive
Retro ComputingDesign_toolsCharacter Sets
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Retro Computing
Design_tools
Character Sets
Unscii: Unscii
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- 01Story posted
Dec 14, 2025 at 10:55 PM EST
26 days ago
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Dec 15, 2025 at 2:26 AM EST
4h after posting
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31 comments in 0-12h
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Dec 19, 2025 at 9:37 AM EST
21 days ago
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ID: 46270282Type: storyLast synced: 12/18/2025, 3:45:25 AM
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Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
It took several seconds to load for me, so here's the first paragraph. It's a good first paragraph, though!
I won't have to wait seconds (!!!) to read it
Secondly, the site appears to be "hug of death"'d at the moment. I presume it was still accessible but struggling when OP posted.
Also:
https://farside.link
https://lite.cnn.com
https://text.npr.org
I'll definitely give this a try in my Linux TTY. Thanks for sharing!
[1] https://www.nerdfonts.com
And recode(1) has full support for ISO-8859-*. As does iconv and the Python3 encodings.codecs module. I'm pretty sure browsers can render pages in them, too. Firefox keeps rendering UTF-8 pages as if they were ISO-8859-1 encoded when I screw up at setting the charset parameter on their content-type.
That's the point. Think again.
With Nerdfonts, these will be obsolete in further Unicode releases.
GNU Unifont and the unicode table might be backported to the Amiga. With NerdFonts, you need to do twice the jobs.
Out of curiosity I checked with lsof, apparently other fonts are used as fallback:
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSans-Bold.ttf
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/droid/DroidSansFallbackFull.ttf
/usr/local/share/fonts/MS/segmdl2.ttf
/usr/local/share/fonts/MS/seguisym.ttf
/usr/local/share/fonts/nerd/Iosevka/IosevkaNerdFont-Regular.ttf
/usr/local/share/fonts/nerd/JetBrainsMono/JetBrainsMonoNerdFontMono-Regular.ttf
At least the result is perfect!
Do you have a link to the MUD you're working on?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixel
we are full circle, 40 year later.
Why couldn't we have FTP and Gopher support in web browsers instead?
I mean not really, they are ancient and horribly insecure protocols without enough users to justify improving them.
Also, you may not have noticed this, but you're commenting on a thread that's largely about PETSCII.
The browser support would have need continous security fixes and rewrites unfortunately, the protocol specs and the code was written in the day and age of a much less adversarial internet. It's much safer to handle those sort of protocols with a HTTPS proxy on the front these days. There's dedicated gopher and ftp clients still out there, IMHO browsers are too big and bloated as they are they need more stuff taken out of them, not more added without taking anything away, particularly stuff thats old and insecure and not used much anymore.
And yes, I'm also here for the retro factor :-) my pet project is Z80/6502 emulation in UnrealEngine with VT100 and VGA support and running BBS's in space. So I'm all over stuff about old ANSI, PETSCII and anything even tangentially 8x8 character set related:
https://i.imgur.com/rIY1he8.png
https://i.imgur.com/DlftREp.png
The entire original point of the WWW project was, approximately, providing a better user interface for accessing files on FTP servers. So to me it seems perverse that the current stewards of the Web have broken that.
Then why do I have it now? Time travel?
See also: The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack from VileR at <https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/>.
I came across this website when I was looking for IBM PC OEM fonts for a little HTML + Canvas-based game I was developing. It is impressive how much effort VileR has poured into recovering each OEM font and their countless variants, from a wide range of ROMs. The site not only archives them all with incredible attention to detail, but also offers live previews, aspect ratio correction and other thoughtful features that make exploring it a joy. I've spent numerous hours there comparing different OEM fonts and hunting down the best ones to use in my own work!
Each UTF8 character (1 to 3 bytes) corresponds to 1 byte of input data. The average increase in data size is about 70%, but you gain binary independence in any medium that understands utf8 (email, the terminal, unit tests, etc.)
Nice work! But if you want something like this in production, base64 only increases the size by 33%.
V with a dot in the middle? I feel like there's gonna be some creative convergence on this one.
I'm envious of the level of nerdiness and genius at display, and hope some of it rubbed off on me by watching that demo.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41370020
I'd like to figure out how that wrong belief could have formed.
When was "years ago"? Unscii 1 is from 2014. That's more than 15 years after the heyday of Mona Font and its predecessors.
I postulate viznut was just not aware of the huge scene due to his parochialism.
I ended up writing a rust parser for the .hex file format for use in my kernel[1]. So I can now display the fantasy kernel on bare-metal :)
[1]: https://github.com/LevitatingBusinessMan/runix/blob/limine/s...
A great deficiency of Unifont mentioned several times in the other thread was its lack of combining-character support, and the absence of alternative glyphs for the code points in scripts like Arabic (well, and Engsvanyáli) whose form is affected by joiner or non-joiner context. Does anyone know if Unscii does better at this?
From opening it in Fontforge, Unscii seems to have pretty broad coverage, including things like Bengali, Ethiopic, and even runic, plus pretty full CJK(V) coverage. It seems to have some of the CSUR https://www.evertype.com/standards/csur/ assignments, such as the Tengwar of Feanor in the range U+E000 to U+E07F, but has conflicting assignments for some other ranges, like the Cirth range U+E080 to U+E0FF (present in Unifont but arguably duplicative with the runic block), which is assigned to Teletext/Videotex block mosaics. I note that my system has different conflicting assignments for this range, with Tux at U+E000 followed by a bunch of dingbats, while the Cirth range is a bunch of math symbols.