Darwin ISO-Latin-1 Font
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.
Update:
Cory Klingsporn submitted an updated version that fixes issues with accented characters. Thanks Cory! Get the new version below.
Download Darwin ISO-Latin-1 Font (TrueType):
 Darwin-ISO-Latin-1.zip. |
Looks spectacular!
Comment by Erik Hinterbichler — September 24, 2008 @ 11:10 pm
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
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
megazoomer is neat :D nice font too, gives terminal a cozy feeling..
Comment by despa — October 30, 2008 @ 11:08 am
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
“Interesting Article – keep up the good work :)
Also, what is the theme have you installed at the moment? I want to know if it’s a free one.”
Comment by ffxi gil — February 26, 2009 @ 2:09 pm
Thanks! the theme installed is called “Northern Web Coders” but I modified it a bunch to suit my needs, especially for the integration with WPG2 and two level menus.
Comment by Joey — February 26, 2009 @ 2:11 pm
My god, and to think that I spent all day today trying to make this font pixel-by-pixel (in FontForge as well, actually) from an image I found of the character set. Thank you, you’ve saved me a lot of time.
I’m noticing other similarities in what we were doing—I was using Apple’s dfont format as well, hehe.
Comment by dalahäst — November 9, 2009 @ 11:12 pm
Perhaps I spoke too soon. This conversion of the font is almost perfect, with one minor exception (no programming pun intended) in the encoding. The letter “á” (lowercase A with acute accent) is floating off in space in the encoding. Some other letters shifted to take its place, resulting in one of the accented lowercase I’s not having any glyph, and causing certain characters to produce the wrong glyph. I’ve tried fixing it myself, but then the only characters that will show up are the accented ones I fixed. Any help?
Comment by dalahäst — November 10, 2009 @ 12:40 am