"DOS fonts" (was RE: Breaking barriers)

Janusz S. Bień jsbien at mimuw.edu.pl
Wed Nov 3 13:13:07 CDT 2021


On Mon, Oct 25 2021 at 20:03 GMT, James Kass wrote:
> On 2021-10-25 5:23 PM, Doug Ewell via Unicode wrote:
>> Peter Constable wrote:
>>
>>>> A DOS command then enabled users to swap the font-in-use.
>>> As I recall, DOS had no such command. Rather, one needed a utility
>>> that would load the font data into specific memory.
>> I suspect James was thinking of the MODE CON CP SELECT=x command, where 'x' was the code page ID of the desired character set.
> My post was poorly phrased.  "A command entered at the DOS prompt"
> would have been better.  It wasn't a native DOS command.  An internet
> search revealed that typical extensions for the modified/newly created
> fonts included "*.F11" or "*.F12".  I couldn't locate the "*.COM" file
> which swapped the font-in-use in my archives, I can't remember the
> file name.  I did find "8859-5.f16" in a directory, which appears to
> be one I made back in the day.

Switching the font started to be possible with EGA, I used to switch
from CP852 to ISO Latin-2 just for fun. Earlier you had to change the
ROM in your graphic card. For Polish letters you had to to "burn in" (?)
your font into your custom ROM (with UHV light if I remember well).

Regards

JSB

P.S. I read the list in a digest form, so my post may cross with other
relevant posting.

-- 
             ,   
Janusz S. Bien
emeryt (emeritus)
https://sites.google.com/view/jsbien



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