Bold version at 9pt and bitmap format

[lobre]

I see on the website this mention:

More than 9000 characters optimized from 9pt to 48pt to guarantee the best possible readability.

This is obviously incredible! I love this carefully crafted aspect of the font, where I suppose a lot of manual hinting has been made. It seems an enormous load of work and only a small amount of fonts have this level of quality. Thank you for your work.

I am enjoying a lot what I see in terms of small sizes in the terminal without antialiasing. I am trying the smallest referenced size, at 9pt and regular characters are all super crisp and legit!

However, it is not exactly the same for the bold version at that size. See the result:

Normally, all the directories listed by the ls command (which are represented in purple) are supposed to be bold. If I go with 10pt, it is effectively the case. But at 9pt, the bold does not show up (or at least not correctly).

If I try to see the difference when bold is fully disabled in my terminal, I have this result:

I realize that some letters are wider in bold mode, without really looking bold. Take the u from the word Pictures. It looks more narrow on the second version without bold enabled. Other letters such as N (in NCYL5996), M (in Music) or w (in Downloads) look a bit bolder. But at that size, pixels are grouped together and it seems there is not enough space for them to make the result distinguishable.

First I wanted to know if what I see is "normal" (because of obvious restrictions)? Then, and if that is normal, does it mean I should find a way to disable bold mode when the size is too low?

I am using Linux (so fontconfig) and my terminal here is xterm invoked with:

xterm -fa "PragmataPro Mono:antialias=false" -fs 9

I would like to avoid having to disable bold mode fully in xterm, because I like being able to dynamically change the font size when I share my screen with colleagues for example (and having the bold in bigger sizes is appreciated). Maybe you know of a way?

And I have a second, but related question. Is PragmataPro available in a bitmap version (say .otb or .bdf for example)? From what I see, I anticipate the response to be "no". So if not, do you know if there are ways to convert the .ttf to a bitmap version? I don't know a lot about font formats, but as the font is good looking at a small size without antialiasing, I have the feeling that the result could be satisfying.

I am asking this because I know that when using the old X11 core fonts system in xterm (for bitmap fonts with the -fn argument and an XLFD font description), the terminal will try to apply "overstriking" (double rendering of the text with a 1px horizontal offset) to simulate bold when a proper bold version is not found. So I was thinking that for small sizes such as 9pt, the effect could maybe work. I know that overstriking does not provide the same quality as a real bold variant, but I am trying to find a compromise here.

Also, some old tools (such as xmessage or lemonbar) don't properly support freetype vector fonts. Having a bitmap version could help in those situations.

Thanks again for your amazing work on that font since the beginning of the project. This is inspiring.

[fabrizioschiavi]

Thank you for your compliments and valuable feedback!

I’m not sure if this issue can be fully resolved, as the limited pixel space available for certain glyphs is often too scarce to achieve a visually pleasing result.

Essentially, I want to avoid the Bold at size 9 from looking like an unreadable Ultra Black.

I'll work on it anyway.

[lobre]

Thanks for your response and for putting that on the roadmap. Much appreciated.

I see that your screenshot does not represent bold glyphs exactly the same as with my xterm window, as we don't have the same visual artefacts.

It is like the N and M from your reference 12 correspond a little bit to what I have. Except that other letters on my terminal don't look as bold as other letters of your 12. I don’t know what could cause this. Anyway, that would be nice if you think there might be room for improvement.

About the bitmap font, did you ever consider releasing a restricted version of PragmataPro in a bitmap format?

(I know that formats such as .bdf don't necessarily support the same encoding as modern formats, so the set of glyphs would be smaller, but this could be an acceptable restriction for some old-tech needs).

[fabrizioschiavi]

Sorry but unfortunately actually the font editors I know no longer allow me to export fonts in bdf format.
If you have an idea of to do this I'll do with pleasure.

[lobre]

May I ask which font software you mainly use?

I saw some old youtube videos where you introduced pragmatapro, and it looks like you were using fontlab on Mac. Is that still acurate?

I see there is a companion app of fontlab which is called "bitfonter" and which is made to edit bitmap fonts.

https://www.fontlab.com/font-editor/bitfonter/

From the feature set, I can see:

Open & Import
TrueType-flavored OpenType SBIT font (.ttf with EBLC and EBDT tables)
...
Imports: Hinted rasterized bitmaps at any PPM/point size from any TTF font installed on the system

Save & Export
Adobe/Unix BDF font (.bdf, monochrome, grayscale and color)

Maybe I could check the trial version of the software.

[lobre]

Also, about fontlab 8, I see:

New in FontLab 8: Batch-export many fonts into many formats. Open and export the .glyphs format in version 2 or 3. Open FontForge SFD files, bitmap BDF fonts and multi-flavor color fonts. Use improved VFJ, UFO, VF support. Export WOFF2 color web fonts.

https://help.fontlab.com/fontlab/8/whats-new/whats-new-11-formats/

But i don't know if it does what I think it does!

[fabrizioschiavi]

Thank you @lobre! I'll try all these solutions