For links to other files go a few screens forward.
This software helps you draw (create) your own bit-mapped font for VT220+ and Wyse terminals (and in the future: printers). You draw the characters as *'s in a text file using any editor or word processor. Then this program scans your drawings and converts them to soft-font code to download to terminals. You will likely need to do a small amount of "programming" in a printer/terminal language to load your soft-font. Another program converts soft-font to a drawing with *'s.
I wrote this program in C around 1990 to generate bit-mapped soft-fonts which can be downloaded into video display terminals: Wyse, VT220. Note that it is mostly based on 1990 (or earlier) manuals and may not be fully up to date. Improvements in the user interface, error checking, and documentation have been made since 1990.
Here is an example of a row of Russian letters you might "draw" in a pattern file. The first letter is A and 6th one is E:
| || || || || || || || | | * ||****** ||****** ||*******|| *****||*******||* * *|| ***** | | * * ||* ||* *||* *|| * *||* ||* * *||* *| | * * ||* ||* *||* || * *||* || * * * || *| |* *||* ||* *||* || * *||* || * * * || *| |* *||****** ||****** ||* || * *||*******|| ***** || **** | |*******||* *||* *||* ||* *||* || * * * || *| |* *||* *||* *||* ||* *||* || * * * || *| |* *||* *||* *||* ||* *||* ||* * *||* *| |* *||*******||****** ||* ||*******||*******||* * *|| ***** | | || || || ||* *|| || || |Next you run the pat2sf program on your patterns and obtain the soft-font code. After this soft-font is downloaded to a terminal, typing on the keyboard will display this font on the screen. You will probably need to write a script of some type (a shell script, Perl script, etc.) to set up your terminal correctly, load the font into the appropriate bank, etc.
sf2pat does the inverse of the above. It converts soft-font to a pattern file containing * characters. To use this software you will need an C compiler that will work for ANSI C (such as the one from the Free Software Foundation). Be sure to look over the documentation before compiling/using. These programs have not been tested much. Be sure to set tabs at 8 when reading the text files (most web browsers do this automatically).
Here is a list of the files available for BitFontEdit at this Website: The ones that are not links you may get by downloading all the files packed in a tar archive (as explained on the next screen).
All of the above files may be found in a gzip (compressed) tar archive, (size 62k compressed). Suggest you read over some of the documentation first to make sure you need it before downloading it.
DOWNLOAD 62K BitFontEdit package NOW: BitFontEdit.tar.gz
To unpack it on a:
Linux system (with GNU's tar) type: tar -xzf BitFontEdit.tar.gz
Unix-like system use gunzip and then type: tar -xf BitFontEdit.tar
If when you download it, your screen fills with garbage, the browser has goofed and thought it was a text file. In any case, you need to save the downloaded stuff to a file (or to a folder/directory). In some cases you must click on "save .." in the browser's File menu. When the tar (or .tar.gz ) archive is unpacked, it should create the folder/directory: BitFontEdit and put everything in it. If you do this in MS DOS, file names will be truncated (but still usable).