September 24, 2008

Darwin ISO-Latin-1 Font

Filed under: Creative, Mac, Technical — Joey @ 12:42 am

Recently I had run across the megazoomer SIMBL plugin, and found that it could make a Terminal.app fullscreen! Something just wasn’t quite right about it though. The white text on the solid black background wanted to look as if I had booted in to single user mode, or started my computer with the verbose boot option on, but no font I could select seemed appropriate. So I began the hunt for the Mac OS X console font to use in Terminal.app in earnest. Eventually I found it, in the form of a C source file. All of the character bitmaps were described in an array in a file called “iso_font.c” in the XNU source. I went on an adventure to find appropriate software to make a font file, and eventually I found a rather dreadful tool called Font Forge, but it worked so I used it. I prepared my font in the BDF ASCII format with liberal application of TextWrangler’s grep based find & replace, as well as a Python script to massage it a bit more. After lots of messing with Font Forge and some tweaking of the metadata, I could export a TrueType bitmap representation of the original Mac OS X console font, which I have provided here. The font is free to use, according to comments in the file as well as the original APSL license, so I am providing it here freely as well under the same terms. Enjoy!

Note: The bitmap is 16pt; other sizes are not recommended.

Download Darwin ISO-Latin-1 Font (TrueType):


Darwin-ISO-Latin-1.zip.

5 Comments »

  1. Looks spectacular!

    Comment by Erik Hinterbichler — September 24, 2008 @ 11:10 pm

  2. Hooray for typefaces! I’m sorry I hadn’t written my awesome type design tool yet.

    Comment by Chad Weider — September 24, 2008 @ 11:21 pm

  3. Chad, It is okay, I guess it was valuable to learn the hard way, but I think you could create a bitmap only version of the tool start from there. : D

    Comment by Joey — September 24, 2008 @ 11:25 pm

  4. megazoomer is neat :D nice font too, gives terminal a cozy feeling..

    Comment by despa — October 30, 2008 @ 11:08 am

  5. Nice! I have used my own BDF conversion of this same font for a few years, but the .dfont is much easier to install. By the way, this Darwin console font was originally derived from a bitmap drawn by Ka-Ping Yee, but it was subsequently heavily modified by someone at Apple (including changing the shape of capital A to be rounded instead of pointy.)

    Comment by Benjamin C. Wiley Sittler — November 17, 2008 @ 12:27 pm

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