ZX82 ABCDEFG: a bicolor drolatique font generator
[dpla's ZX Spectrum edition – version 1.0 or ROIAOAIO]
294 visible text characters, in 'Extended ASCII' (U0020-FF) and a few beyond.
7 code pages (CP) to switch from, and 48 cells left unassigned (in CP 4 to 6).
Feel free to add your private glyphs, provided you retain the original mapping;
you may replace them with invisible formatting controls (e.g. for animations).
The CP switches are 7 visible control characters, applied once or indefinitely,
that is: K/B/R/M/G/C/Y → temporary; KY/BY/RY/MY/GY/CY/YY → permanent.
Please, bear in mind that my main mapping (CP 0) is based on our 6 vowels,
contrary to A-Z substitutions (like David B. Kelley's "6-Color Binary Alphabet").
This implementation uses 7 colors in ascending RGB on a white background
(hence my title: a 8-bit allusion to the ZX Spectrum Ink and Paper on screen).
Example: "Hello·world!" = "BY K RM RK MM MM GK •CR GK GM MM BM KK"
where the letters = their abbreviated color (0-6), and 'Space' / "•" = White (7).
Typically on a display, you can resort to a pair of characters (any block / bar)
but you can use the material of your choice (e.g. balloons, the air being "W"),
even derivate in color (symbols), size (micro), view (vector, 3D), language…
Script & mapping: copyright © 2014-2018 dpla; else: under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
dpla.fr/fonts/7-color
This font combines two simple ideas and puts them together. Braille and color theory.
I had a long time been holding on to this font (about 2 years) but decided that maybe someone out there would like it. Its complicated, in a way, but can end up being the most compressed "barcode" I have ever seen. (With the average letter taking up approximately 2 pixels when used in its "second form" but we will get into that later.
As with many of my fonts, is rooted in braille. So a knowledge in braille is neccesary. (Braille is very very easy to learn)
So heres the nuts and bolts. Lets take a 3 letter word in braille, say, "ice"
o| oo| o
o | | o
i c e
in of itself it takes three braille spots, but, what if we were to use color theory to compress it?
the first letter would be red, the second in yellow, the third in blue? You could have them occupy the same place and have no loss of information! Anywhere red overlapped the yellow, it would be orange, anywhere yellow overlapped blue it would be green! etc.
so, "Ice" could now be expressed as
green, orange
red, blue
The word "Ice" is conveyed in a 2x2 packet of colored pixels!
Which brings me to my font. "Rybian" (a play on words of "RedYellowBlue-ian" is a colorless way of expressing that same form.
red is a horizontal line
yellow is a circle
blue is a verticle line
so, logically, orange would be a circle with a horizontal line in it
green would be a circle with a verticle line in it
purple would be a verticle and horizontal line
Font based on the font in Pokémon Gold/Silver/Crystal.
Existing characters are the same as in the game while I tried to fill in for some common characters that are missing.
Some notes:
Pk, Mn, and :L replace ¼, ½, and ¾, respectively.
Korean font's punctuation/Arabic numerals are contained within Fullwidth forms.
Also, I guess Fontstruct doesn't support precomposed Hangul characters, so I'm out of luck there. The full-size individual Hangul letters are in Hangul Jamo, while the smaller ones (like on the name entry screen) are in halfwidth forms.
Halfwidth katakana is the same as fullwidth, but fullwidth Latin is different.
Halfwidth versions of the won/yen symbols are the currency symbol, while the fullwidth version is the language's character for it.
Unown letters are contained within the letters in circled capital letters section of Enclosed Alphanumerics.
Some ligatures ('s, d', etc.) are found within the lowercase parentheses and circled letters of Enclosed Alphanumerics.