FAUXTARI(7)

NAME
fauxtari - Atari 8-bit-based font for Linux console and X11/Wayland/Mac/Windows

DESCRIPTION

fauxtari is a set of monospaced bitmap fonts for use with the Linux console or graphical environments such as X11. Most of the glyphs are taken from the Atari XL/XE ROM font; see GLYPHS, below.

Three font formats are provided: psf, for use with the console; bdf, for use with "old-school" X11 apps such as xterm(1); and ttf for use with modern X11/Wayland/Mac/Windows apps.

APPEARANCE

The console (psf files) and X11 (bdf files) fonts each come in 3 sizes: 8x8 (original size), 16x16 (scaled 2x), and 24x24 (scaled 3x). The scaling has no interpolation or antialiasing, so the larger fonts have a blocky "retro" look.

The appearance of the font is also vertically squashed, since it was designed for non-square pixels (NTSC and PAL "pixels" are slightly taller than they are wide). This allows you to fit a lot of text on the screen, in the console or with a fullscreen X terminal:
Font Size | Display Size | Characters
8x8 | 1280x1024 | 160x128
8x8 | 1920x1080 | 240x135
8x8 | 3840x2160 | 480x270
16x16 | 1280x1024 | 80x64
16x16 | 1920x1080 | 120x67
16x16 | 3840x2160 | 240x135
24x24 | 1280x1024 | 53x42
24x24 | 1920x1080 | 80x45
24x24 | 3840x2160 | 160x90

Of course, the smaller font sizes might be too small to read, especially on smaller displays.

The TrueType font is scalable, but always retains the pixelated look.

CONSOLE

If the psf fonts have been installed to the standard console font directory (usually /usr/share/kbd/consolefonts/; this is done by make install when bw-atari8-tools is built), you can use e.g.:

setfont fauxtari-16

Replace the 16 with 8 or 24, for the other sizes. For Slackware Linux, you can make this the default in /etc/rc.d/rc.font, or just put it in /etc/rc.d/rc.local. Other Linux distributions will have their own ways to set this up (especially systemd-based ones).

X11/ETC

  TTF (scalable)

The scalable font is called Fauxtari Scalable Mono, and should be selectable from graphical applications that allow choosing the font. You may also see Fauxtari Fixed Mono in the list; this is the bdf font.

It can also be used in urxvt and xterm (provided xterm was built with support for TTF fonts):

urxvt -fn 'xft:Fauxtari Scalable Mono:pixelsize=16'
xterm -fa 'Fauxtari Scalable Mono' -fs 16

The font can be scaled to any size, though it will look best if you stick with multiples of 8 pixels.

The scalable font should also work on Wayland, Macintosh, or Windows systems, though this hasn't been tested.

  BDF (non-scalable)

If the bdf fonts have been installed (via make install when bw-atari8-tools is built), you should be able to launch a terminal via:

xterm -fn fauxtari-16

Replace the 16 with 8 or 24, for the other sizes. These names are aliases (added to fonts.alias in the font directory); the full names are:

•   -bw-fauxtari fixed mono-medium-r-normal--8-80-75-75-c-80-iso10646-1

•   -bw-fauxtari fixed mono-medium-r-normal--16-160-75-75-c-160-iso10646-1

•   -bw-fauxtari fixed mono-medium-r-normal--24-240-75-75-c-240-iso10646-1

    For urxvt(1), you might have to turn off the boldFont resource (set it to an empty string), or run it as:

    urxvt -fn fauxtari-16 -fb ""

    This keeps urxvt from using some other font (from its built-in list, or from your URxvt.font resource) for bold characters.

    For st from suckless.org, run:

    st -f fauxtari-16

    It's possible to use the fonts with rxvt, but since rxvt doesn't support Unicode, it won't be all that useful except for plain ASCII text. Why are you still using rxvt, anyway?

GLYPHS

All 3 sizes contain the same set of glyphs. These include:

•   Printable ASCII. Complete. Mostly taken from the Atari 800XL ROM ($E000 area), except the ~ { } ` characters which are missing from the Atari's character set (these were hand-drawn by the author).

•   Unicode mappings for ATASCII graphics characters. Complete set. These work well with listbas(1), a8cat(1), and a8xd(1). The glyphs are taken from the 800XL ROM.

•   The XL International Character set (umlauted/accented letters, plus the ¡ character and the British pound sign), taken from the 800XL ROM ($CC00 area).

•   Arabic, taken from Atari's Arabic model of the 65XE. Only the isolated and terminal letter forms are included, but these are also mapped to the Unicode codepoints for the initial and medial forms. Hopefully this results in readable Arabic text. The creator of fauxtari can't read Arabic at all and doesn't know anyone who can, so some of the character mappings may be wrong.

•   Hebrew glyphs, the complete aleph-bet, taken from the Hebrew ROM modification that was available for sale in Israel in the early 1980s. I'm almost 100% certain this was a 3rd-party product, not made by Atari.

•   Polish accented letters, taken from a Polish XL ROM found on the Web at some point. No idea who created this or whether it was homebrew or commercial.

•   A few extra Latin-1 characters, hand-drawn by the author. These include Spanish punctuation (quotation marks, inverted question mark), the copyright symbol, and the Euro currency sign.

•   TODO: Commodore 64 graphics characters.

LIMITATIONS

•   There should be more glyphs; at least Unicode Latin-1 should have complete coverage. Some of them (e.g. fractions) will be hard to do in 8x8 character cells...

•   There are no true descenders, since the Atari ROM character set doesn't use them. Someday I may add hand-hacked true descender versions of the fonts.

COPYRIGHT

WTFPL. See http://www.wtfpl.net/txt/copying/ for details.

AUTHOR

B.  Watson <urchlay@slackware.uk>; Urchlay on irc.libera.chat ##atari.

SEE ALSO

a8cat(1), a8eol(1), a8xd(1), atr2xfd(1), atrsize(1), axe(1), bas2aplus(1), blob2c(1), blob2xex(1), cart2xex(1), cxrefbas(1), dasm2atasm(1), diffbas(1), dumpbas(1), f2toxex(1), fenders(1), listbas(1), listamsb(1), protbas(1), renumbas(1), rom2cart(1), unmac65(1), unprotbas(1), vxrefbas(1), whichbas(1), xex1to2(1), xexamine(1), xexcat(1), xexsplit(1), xfd2atr(1), xex(5), atascii(7), fauxtari(7).

Any good Atari 8-bit book: De Re Atari, The Atari BASIC Reference Manual, the OS Users' Guide, Mapping the Atari, etc.