rjmcguire / 3270font

A 3270 font in a modern format

3270font: A font for the nostalgic

A little bit of history

This font is derived from the x3270 font, which, in turn, was translated from the one in Georgia Tech's 3270tool, which was itself hand-copied from a 3270 series terminal. I built it because I felt terminals deserve to be pretty. The .sfd font file contains a x3270 bitmap font that was used for guidance.

![Using with the cool-old-tern (now cool-retro-term) terminal program] (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wiki/rbanffy/3270font/cool-retro-term.png)

Getting it

If you are running Debian or Ubuntu and you don't want to mess with building your font files, you can simply apt-get install fonts-3270 (It's available from the Debian and Ubuntu package repos at https://packages.debian.org/sid/fonts/fonts-3270 and http://packages.ubuntu.com/xenial/fonts/fonts-3270, although the packaged version may not be the latest version, but it's good enough for most purposes. For those who don't have the luxury of a proper system-managed package, Adobe Type 1, TTF, OTF and WOFF versions are available for download on http://s3.amazonaws.com/3270font/3270_fonts_0608bf3.zip (although this URL may not always reflect the latest version).

![ASCII is so 60's] (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wiki/rbanffy/3270font/cyrillic.png)

The format

The "source" file is edited using FontForge. You'll need it if you want to generate fonts for your platform. On most civilized operating systems, you can simply apt-get install fontforge, yum install fontforge or even port install fontforge. On others, you may need to grab your copy from http://fontforge.org/. I encourage you to drop by and read the tutorials.

![Powerline-shell compatible!] (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wiki/rbanffy/3270font/powerline.png)

![Using it on OSX (don't forget to turn antialiasing on)] (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wiki/rbanffy/3270font/osx_terminal.png)

If you are running Windows, you'll probably need something like Cygwin, but, in the end, the font works correctly (with some very minor hinting issues).

![Works on Windows] (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wiki/rbanffy/3270font/windows_7.png)

Generating usable font files

The easiest way to generate the font files your computer can use is to run make all (if you are running Ubuntu or Debian, make install will install them too). Using make help will offer a handy list of options.

The script generate_derived.pe calls FontForge and generates PostScript, OTF, TTF and WOFF versions of the base font, as well as a slightly more condensed .sfd file with the base font narrowed to 488 units, with no glyph rescaling (or cropping - we need to fix that) and its corresponding PostScript, TTF, OTF and WOFF versions.

![For your favorite editor] (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wiki/rbanffy/3270font/symbols.png)

Contributing

I fear GitHub's pull-request mechanism may not be very FontForge-friendly. If you want to contribute (there are a lot of missing glyphs, such as the APL set and most non-latin alphabets which most likely were never built into 3270 terminals), the best workflow would be to make add the encoding slots (if needed), add/make the changes, reencode it in "Unicode, Full", compact it and validate it. Check if the git diff command gives out something sensible (does not change things you didn't intend to) and make a pull request. If, in doubt, get in touch and we will figure out how to do it right.

Preserving history

I regard the evolution of electronic computing a very important part of our civilization's history. Consider donating to entities that help preserve it, such as the Computer History Museum (http://www.computerhistory.org/), the IT History Society (http://ithistory.org/) and many others around the world. If you have a historically significant piece of technology in your closet or garage, consider contacting a local technology or industrial-design-oriented museum for advice.

Known problems

Not all symbols in the 3270 charset have Unicode counterparts. When possible, they are duplicated in the Unicode space. The 3270-only symbols are at the end of the font, along with some glyphs useful for building others.

Please refer to http://x3270.bgp.nu/Charset.html for a complete map.