Recreation of old IBM terminal font

[Ricardo Bánffy]

I folks.

I recreated (retraced over the x3270 font bitmaps, added a couple extras, all licensed under the original BSD-like license) the 3270 terminal font used by IBM terminals from the 60's and 70's (up to mid-80's, I think). I am in the process of adding metadata such as FONTLOG entries, a proper changelog etc and would appreciate a review. I am not sure it, being derived of a font that was used in the 60's (I sincerely hope its original designer is still alive and well), would qualify for the Google Fonts project. 

If anyone wants to give some input, it's available at https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font. It's also available on Debian and Ubuntu (sorry, no Fedora for now).

Cheers,

Ricardo

[Dave Crossland]

Hi

Wow, awesome project! :) 

Since there is no copyright on bitmap font designs, I wonder if you'd be willing to license your digital outlines under the SIL Open Font License v1.1 with no Reserved Font Name? :) 

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Cheers
Dave

[Ricardo Bánffy]

Sorry for the *very* late response, Dave.

About relicensing, the original x3270 license (https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font/blob/master/LICENSE.txt) asserts copyright down to GA Tech's GTRC. While the bitmaps can be considered data, they were manually captured and I'm not aware of the implications of that to copyright. I could dual-license the Fontforge file under SIL OFL as you suggest. I'll check how to make that change in the LICENSE.txt file.

Cheers,

Ricardo

On Tuesday, January 5, 2016 at 10:32:14 PM UTC, Dave Crossland wrote:

Hi

Wow, awesome project! :) 

Since there is no copyright on bitmap font designs, I wonder if you'd be willing to license your digital outlines under the SIL Open Font License v1.1 with no Reserved Font Name? :) 

On 23 December 2015 at 08:14, Ricardo Bánffy <rba...@gmail.com> wrote:

I folks.

I recreated (retraced over the x3270 font bitmaps, added a couple extras, all licensed under the original BSD-like license) the 3270 terminal font used by IBM terminals from the 60's and 70's (up to mid-80's, I think). I am in the process of adding metadata such as FONTLOG entries, a proper changelog etc and would appreciate a review. I am not sure it, being derived of a font that was used in the 60's (I sincerely hope its original designer is still alive and well), would qualify for the Google Fonts project. 

If anyone wants to give some input, it's available at https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font. It's also available on Debian and Ubuntu (sorry, no Fedora for now).

Cheers,

Ricardo

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Cheers
Dave

[Dave Crossland]

Hi

In the USA, I believe bitmap fonts are not subject to copyright. This is not legal advice, just my own personal opinion. If you can OFL it (with no RFN), we can onboard it :) 

On 13 April 2017 at 08:46, Ricardo Bánffy <rba...@gmail.com> wrote:

Sorry for the *very* late response, Dave.

About relicensing, the original x3270 license (https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font/blob/master/LICENSE.txt) asserts copyright down to GA Tech's GTRC. While the bitmaps can be considered data, they were manually captured and I'm not aware of the implications of that to copyright. I could dual-license the Fontforge file under SIL OFL as you suggest. I'll check how to make that change in the LICENSE.txt file.

Cheers,

Ricardo

On Tuesday, January 5, 2016 at 10:32:14 PM UTC, Dave Crossland wrote:

Hi

Wow, awesome project! :) 

Since there is no copyright on bitmap font designs, I wonder if you'd be willing to license your digital outlines under the SIL Open Font License v1.1 with no Reserved Font Name? :) 

On 23 December 2015 at 08:14, Ricardo Bánffy <rba...@gmail.com> wrote:

I folks.

I recreated (retraced over the x3270 font bitmaps, added a couple extras, all licensed under the original BSD-like license) the 3270 terminal font used by IBM terminals from the 60's and 70's (up to mid-80's, I think). I am in the process of adding metadata such as FONTLOG entries, a proper changelog etc and would appreciate a review. I am not sure it, being derived of a font that was used in the 60's (I sincerely hope its original designer is still alive and well), would qualify for the Google Fonts project. 

If anyone wants to give some input, it's available at https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font. It's also available on Debian and Ubuntu (sorry, no Fedora for now).

Cheers,

Ricardo

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Cheers
Dave

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Cheers
Dave

[Felipe Sanches]

This is happening **right now** (like... his last commit was a few minutes ago):
https://github.com/wyatt8740/IBM3161-font/commits/master

RBánffy, is this equivalent to the work you've been doing? Or is it complementary work?

I'm really glad to see people working on revivals of vintage computer fonts! (also nice to see a fellow brazilian hacker getting involved in this sort of nice stuff) It sort of reminds me of an old idea of mine to extract bitmap fonts from character generator ROMs from the MAME collection of emulators for arcade machines and ancient computers...

Happy Hacking!

Felipe Sanches

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[Ricardo Bánffy]

Not exactly. His work preserves the original bitmap's pixels. It's also from a different, newer terminal.

And that MAME thing, let's get started on that.

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Ricardo Bánffy
http://about.me/rbanffy

[Ricardo Bánffy]

Sorry for the slightly less late response.

I made a couple fixes and added the option to license the SFD file under the license. Should I add the full license text below?

The changed LICENSE.txt file can be seen at https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font/blob/develop/LICENSE.txt

[Marc Foley]

Oh man, I actually love this :-)

What's with all the empty halfwidth hangul characters, FF64–FFFE?

[Ricardo Bánffy]

Thanks, Marc.

I think the katakana and hangul sets were empty but allocated in the original bitmap as imported, possibly for other alphabets (there were Greek and Hebrew versions of the 3270) or the IBM APL characters. Since indexes have changed and importing the original bitmaps for reference makes a mess, I guess it'd be better to just remove those empty slots. Eventually I'll get to the APL set (I'm finishing the Ogden set right now, even though it never was available on the 3270's, it's something I promised to do when I moved to Ireland).

Cheers,

Ricardo

On Tue, Apr 18, 2017 at 10:33 PM, 'Marc Foley' via Google Fonts Discussions <googlefon...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Oh man, I actually love this :-)

What's with all the empty halfwidth hangul characters, FF64–FFFE?

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