Topaz Unicode

https://gitlab.com/Screwtapello/topaz-unicode#topaz-unicode

by todsacerdoti • 2 years ago

129 29 2 years ago

gitlab.com

Nzen• 2 years ago

tl;dr monospace bitmap font inspired from amiga 500. The page includes a picture. You can download a copy [0].

[0] https://gitlab.com/Screwtapello/topaz-unicode/-/jobs/6024060...

kstrauser5• 2 years ago

Nitpick: Topaz shipped with the Amiga 1000 in 1985.

thristian3• 2 years ago

As I understand it, the Kickstart ROM wasn't ready in time for the Amiga 1000's release, so you had to boot off a Kickstart disk which loaded the "permanent" resources into RAM, then swap to the Workbench disk which loaded the GUI. So although Topaz shipped with the Amiga 1000 (on floppy disk), I wasn't comfortable calling it part of the Amiga 1000 the way it was part of the Amiga 500.

kstrauser5• 2 years ago

That’s correct. I had a Kickstart 1.1 disk to boot from. I feel like the Kickstart on that floppy was as much a part of the A1000 as the Kickstart on the A500’s ROM was part of it. The only difference is was the media it loaded from.

sigil3• 2 years ago

Wait a second, is this the same font used by QBASIC.EXE and EDIT.EXE?

kstrauser5• 2 years ago

Nope. Microsoft had their own font that was different from Topaz.

sigil3• 2 years ago

You’re right. Topaz is eerily familiar though, and I never used an Amiga. Wondering if a well-known MSDOS program used it. Turbo Pascal?

TonyTrapp2• 2 years ago

Not quite. QBASIC.EXE/EDIT.EXE use the text mode ROM font. If you didn't load a specific font in DOS (e.g. to switch code pages), you'd get whatever your graphic card's ROM shipped with.

chaxor• 2 years ago

The font names are edit.exe?

I always found it strange that fonts are executables and yet we hear so few uses of fonts as malware.

The Linux repo for Ms fonts seems like such a perfect way to get RCE on Linux computer due to the number of people that need some crappy Times New Roman for a paper submission requirement. They're even called TimesNewRoman.exe or Arial.exe.

TonyTrapp2• 2 years ago

Fonts are not executable files, those are the official redistributables by Microsoft to install those fonts on systems where they are missing. TrueType fonts are a highly complex file format though, so there have been plenty of RCEs due to broken font parsing in the past.

colejohnson66• 2 years ago

Fonts are not executables in the way you think they are. They do have code for hinting, but it is not executable in the sense of x86 or ARM code. It’s a custom bytecode designed for an interpreter. If a font is being distributed as an executable, that’s because someone’s wrapped it in an installer.

wolverine876• 2 years ago

Maybe I misunderstand you: I believe they are saying that EDIT.EXE, an executable that edited text, used the Topaz font. Microsoft Word uses fonts, but those fonts aren't named "Word".

LocalH3• 2 years ago

Yes and they're also extracted without execution if you install them on Linux. I believe they're self-extracting CABs

LocalH3• 2 years ago

This is Topaz, specifically the version used in the 1.x series of AmigaOS releases. It is very similar to the original IBM CGA/BIOS font but not identical.

daneel_w• 2 years ago

This is the version of Topaz that came with KS (Kickstart) version 1.x. Commodore revised the font for KS 2.x: https://csdb.dk/gfx/releases/121000/121035.png

pcherna3• 2 years ago

Nice. I worked at Commodore and was responsible (ish) for the new Topaz for OS 2.0. We had been told to replace Topaz with a sans-serif font, and we replaced it with a font originally called "Clear" that was on one of the Fred Fish disks.

There was a big argument over the lower-case L. It has a rightward curl at the base even though it's sans-serif. This is widely seen now, but we had a lot of pushback at the time.

Topaz shipped in an 8-point and 9-point version. As I mentioned, we used Clear, maybe with a few mods (ampersand maybe), but that only existed in 8-point. I drew Topaz 9 sans-serif by starting with Topaz 9, and shaving off the serifs, and making minor tweaks.

pcherna3• 2 years ago

Hehe, thinking maybe the font we used was called "Clean", not "Clear".

LocalH3• 2 years ago

I went looking. The font "Clean" that's part of the NewFonts package on Fish disk 34 is pretty much identical to the font I've seen that was included in 1.4 prototypes. Kinda similar to a proportional font that shipped with DPaint IV if I'm not mistaken

weinzierl3• 2 years ago

"It's a single-size bitmap font, and most modern operating systems have dropped support for anything but TrueType and OpenType scalable fonts."

Not that I would recommend it or had an example where it was successfully done, but I think technically OpenType can contain bitmap fonts also.

thristian3• 2 years ago

OpenType can contain vector outlines, hinting instructions to align those outlines to pixel boundaries at low resolutions, and also pre-rendered bitmaps for systems that don't want to run the hinting VM for each glyph. Some tools will let you make an OpenType font with only pre-rendered bitmaps, but I think there's still systems that don't render such a font correctly, and also I don't think you can store multiple sizes of pre-rendered bitmaps, so you still only get one size. The technique used here (turning each source pixel into a vector square) renders just as crisply at the right size, and is more compatible.

weinzierl3• 2 years ago

Not an OpenType expert but there seem to be two ways to store bitmap data: EBDT and sbits. From what I understand, both can store different sizes. For the latter the Microsoft documentation is pretty clear: "A font can also include different bitmap data for different sizes (“strikes”)"

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/s...

Topaz Unicode

Related Stories