Feature request / discussion: Additional (font) characters

[Commander1024]

Ohai,

I built a VersaTerm and it work totally fine. But aside of retro computers (following the VT102 standard), I do like using it on (modern) Linux/BSD boxes as well. It's fantastic that it does support ridiculous high baud rates and ANSI color support fills my heart with love, too.

I have just a minor thing that bothers me a bit, and that is the German umlauts (or other language-specific chars and maybe a few (?) pseudo graphic UTF-8 characters). Those are printed as escape sequences and "destroy" or shift the layout. Would it even be possible to add additional characters to the font(s)?
I see international characters being mentioned in VT5xx standard. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT520)

I totally get it, that something like this is totally off-scope for this project (being a VT102 terminal), I'm rather interested in hearing, what had to be done to achieve such a goal.

Regards, Commander1024

[dhansel]

VersaTerm allows you to upload up to four user-defined fonts. That should allow you
to define any non-english language character you need. It's not trivial but doable,
I'll be happy to help if you run into problems.

To create a font, create a Windows BMP bitmap file with the following characteristics:

• Windows BMP file format, monochrome, no compression
• characters must be 8 pixels wide and 8-16 pixels high
• bitmap width must be a multiple of 32 pixels
• bitmap height must be a multiple of the character height
• ((bitmap width) * (bitmap height)) must equal (2048 * (character height))

It's easiest to start out with a downloaded bitmap such as this 8x16 VGA font:
http://www.alexandrugroza.ro/microelectronics/essays-research/vga-rom-fonts/_pict/vga-rom-fonts-ag869x16.bmp
I found that on this site:
http://www.alexandrugroza.ro/microelectronics/essays-research/vga-rom-fonts/index.html
but with a bit of searching you can find many more on the web.

You can then modify (or re-order) the characters to in the bitmap your liking.
Or find a font bitmap that has all the characters you need at their expected location.
VersaTerm will the font characters defined in the bitmap to ASCII codes in
order left-to-right, top-to-bottom.

Once you have a font bitmap, connect your PC to VersaTerm either via a usb-to-serial
adapter or by connecting the PC USB port to the Pi Pico's on-board USB micro port.
Note that if you use the Pico's USB micro port then you can't have a USB keyboard
connected at the same time - so you must use a PS/2 keyboard in that case.

Open TeraTerm on your computer and make sure you have a proper connection.
Easy to test by just typing characters in VersaTerm/TeraTerm and checking whether
they show up on the other end.

Once everything is connected properly:

1. In VersaTerm, go to Font Settings->Edit user font 1->Upload font bitmap
2. In TeraTerm, select "File->Transfer->XModem->Send"
3. Select the font bitmap file and click "Ok". That should upload the font.
4. Once the font is uploaded successful you can test it by selecting "View font" in VersaTerm.
5. To make VersaTerm use the font, change the "Font Settings->Normal Font" setting to "User 1"

Writing this out it sounds pretty complicated but it really isn't.
I would suggest just trying to upload the font file I referenced above to test it out.
Once you know how it works you can modify the font to suit your needs.

[Commander1024]

That's a pretty wholesome answer. Didn't realize that's possible with the font upload feature. Will give that a try, should be well within my capabilities. Thank you very much!

[JacekRuzyczka]

OK, it's good to hear that you support extra fonts. But: Is communication in UTF-8 also supported? Many recent Unix / Linux systems only support UTF-8 when talking to a terminal, and even the newest VT terminals appeared before the advent of UTF-8.

[dhansel]

No, UTF-8 is not supported at the moment. When I built this I meant it to be a versatile terminal for
interacting with vintage computers, pre Unicode era.