A Unicode code page 437 font
Use this font if you have a historic application that you would like to view on a modern desktop. You should use this font if you have an application that was written for DOS, or PC-based Unix/Linux/BSD that you would like to run on a modern unicode-based OS.
You'll know that you need this if you struggle with the following screenshot, and wish it looked like the second screenshot.
In particular this is useful for terminal (vt100 or dos) emulators in browsers.
To use this font in a browser, add the following to your CSS files:
@font-face {
font-family: 'FourThreeSeven';
font-style: normal;
font-weight: 400;
src: local('FourThreeSeven'), url(FourThreeSevenMedium.ttf) format('truetype');
}
#mydiv {
font-family: FourThreeSeven, monospace;
line-height: 100%; /* prevent horizontal stripes/vertical gaps */
}
This has been tested on modern browsers in 2015.
This means: Firefox on Linux, Chrome on Linux, Firefox on Android, Chrome on Android.
This implements code page 437. The glyphs at location 0x80 to 0xFF are different from unicode.
This font was written to be small in data, for use on tablets and phones, and therefore all unicode glyphs above 0xFF have been deleted.
Android devices will attempt to substitute missing glyphs from the built-in fonts. Linux browsers will render a square to show a missing glyph.
If it's your intention to use a monospace font for this kind of work, I recommend reading up on CSS line-height, and how different browsers render fonts. Despite what is promised, font rendering is not pixel-exact across browsers -- or even the same browser on different platforms.
A long, long time ago applications had a need for only a few characters. Applications assumed Latin English characters, Arabic numberals, and a few extras.
It was deemed a good idea to standardise on some characters. So we developed standards. Two of them, of course. EBCDIC on the mainframes, and ASCII on the PCs.
Later non-Latin characters (mainly Cyrillic) were added. So again, we needed a standard map, and again there were two standards. Code page 437 on western european and US PCs, and code page 850 on eastern european PCs. These were embedded in the BIOS.
Even later Unicode was developed. Unicode -- in keeping with tradition -- also had multiple standards. but that's OK since none of them match either code page 437 or 850.
Browsers use unicode. Old applications assume code page 437. This is where they meet.
The font glyphs come from GNU Unifont, available at http://unifoundry.com/unifont.html
Copyright (C) 2014 Roman Czyborra, Paul Hardy, Qianqian Fang, Andrew Miller, et al.
Licensed under the GNU General Public License; either version 2, or (at your option) a later version, with the GNU Font Embedding Exception.