14 February 2025
I spent some more time debating with myself about expanding my coverage of these lovely Hershey fonts to some of the other sets, but have decided for the moment to pause with the plain and simplex versions of the Roman set. These more than meet my immediate requirements for the present project and are nice to look at as well.
Now I need to go beyond plotting a single character in the center of the screen and write a little code to send them out to the screen in a more utilitarian manner. For now I’m going to use the ‘native’ resolution of 21 ‘raster units’ in height and see if I can get three lines of readable type on the screen at once.
Without scaling the fonts, the most I can get is two lines of text. But that is when I don’t accomodate the ‘tall bois’, like the ‘[‘ and ‘]’ brackets and , surprisingly, the lower case ‘j’. Expanding all the margins so that everything actually fits only allows a single line of text, sometimes with as few as 4 characters, for important messages such as “mmmm” or “—-“.
Revisiting the ever-so-fascinating statistics of a few days ago, we see where this is coming from:
Max width 30 613 m
Max x 11 613 m
Min x -11 613 m
Max y 16 607 g
Min y -16 719 $Well, there’s our friend, the expansive ‘m’ and the other titans of the simplex set.
So now it’s time to scale the fonts and see if I can get a more useful number of characters on the screen at the same time and still have them be legible.