About

Terminus Font is a clean, fixed width bitmap font, designed for long (8 and more hours per day) work with computers. Version 4.40 contains 1241 characters, covers about 120 language sets and supports ISO8859-1/2/5/7/9/13/15/16, Paratype-PT154/PT254, KOI8-R/U/E/F, Esperanto, many IBM, Windows and Macintosh code pages, as well as the IBM VGA, vt100 and xterm pseudographic characters.

Sizes: 6x12, 8x14, 8x16, 10x18, 10x20, 11x22, 12x24, 14x28 and 16x32.
Styles: normal and bold (except for 6x12), plus EGA/VGA-bold for 8x14 and 8x16.

Screenshots (with ao2 and gq2 applied)

Changes

Version 4.40:

• Added 6 combining accents as separate characters.
• Added 14 letters with dot above / dot below.
• Added partial subscript and superscript: all digits and 11 letters.
• Added 30+ math characters, notably large braces, brackets and parens.
• Added unicode range 2800-28FF in two variants (br1 and br2).
• A few small character fixes.
• Altered configure to be a bit more POSIX compliant.
• Replaced some obscure (un)install Makefile targets with variables.

Version 4.39:

• Added ballot, checkmark, heavy ballot and heavy checkmark.
• Changed HT, LF etc. in sizes 14 and 18-hi2 to be proportional to the letter height, not the matrix height.
• Added the powerline characters E0A0..E0A2 and E0B0..E0B3.
• Added diameter (2300) - same glyph as empty set (2205).
• Small improvements in size 32.

Version 4.38:

• Added 23 pseudographic characters, most notably rounded frames.
• Added new td1 variant with centered ascii tidle.
• Marked windows installer as "admin level". Hope it works under 7even.
• Fixed Y acute in sizes 22 and 28, internal optimizations (invisible).

Version 4.36:

• Removed the rarely used cm2 variant.
• Added new ll2 variant with more distinctive l.
• Added quotereversed (201B), quotedblreversed (201F), I/i/U/u dotbelow (1ECA, 1ECB, 1EE4, 1EE5).
• Moved all quotes and alike in size 32 one line down.
• Small fixes and improvements (t commaaccent, quotes alignment etc. in some sizes).
• Windows installation: creates the relevant registry key.

Version 4.35:

• Added hi2 variant for size 18.
• Fixes in size 18: normal V, normal W, bold X, H stroke, some pseudographic characters and the *NIX installation.

Version 4.34: (removed due to bugs)

• Added size 10x18.
• Small fixes and improvements in section, multiply, Eng, eng, Dje, dje, house, male, infinity, zeta and various other characters in the different sizes.
• The default cyrillic ghe is now ge1, with ge2 available as variant.

Version 4.32:

• Slightly more distintive normal M and W.
• Rounded 28-bold, 32-normal, 32-bold.
  Also removed the 32-normal kx2 style.
• Small changes: Che/che stroke, phi, Zhe/zhe etc.
• Linux console: the default bold is now framebuffer.
• Smaller Makefile, GNU make required.
• Changed the font license to SIL OFL 1.1.
  It's FSF approved, no need to worry.
• And, as you can see, Terminus Font is now on sourceforge.

Version 4.30:

• Added size 22 (not very good).
• Added nother 25 characters.
• Various small fixes and improvements.
• Changed the default prefix and x11dir.

Version 4.28:

• Heavy frames (written mostly by Tim Allen) and a few more letters.
• Altered trianges and arrows, small bugfixes.
• Reorganized the 512-character console font to include more letters instead of the IBM-437 specific pseudographics.

Character variants

ao1 => ao2 - nice, but sometimes hard to distinguish from 'o'.

dv2 => dv1 - due to character matrix limitations, the printing de and ve are of slightly worse quality.

ge1 => ge2 - only for 0433, 0453 and 0491, not 0493 and 0495

gq1 => gq2 - some programs still use ` and ' as single quotes.

ij2 => ij1 (also short i)

ka1 => ka2 - the high cyrillic ka is used as decorative in Bulgaria; the latin 'k' is always high, of course.

ll1 => ll2 - should pass the il1I test (depends on your resolution and monitor quality), but the horizontal alignment is a bit worse.

td2 => td1 - perhaps td1 should be the default

hi1 => hi2 - higher upper case letters, digits etc. for size 18 - looks better, but there is even less space between the lines.

br2 => br1 - a bit more similar to Braille. X11 only, no Windows code page includes unicode range 2800-28FF.

Download

Unix/Linux source

Windows installer

View all files

Linux binary packages: check your distribution repository.

Frequently asked questions:

Q. Italic version?

A. No. The quality is significantly lower, and preserving the font width requires overlapping characters, which are not handled very well by X11/Xft. Anyway, the modern GUIs support automatic slanting; if you are not satisfied with it, try mkitalic from FreeBSD or bdfslant from Debian.

Q. Scalable version?

A. Long story short, when the average display resolution becomes at least 150 DPI. Prefferably 200.

Q. How about some new characters?

A. Contact me and be ready to help.

Q. The bold 6x12 font...

A. ...does not exist, there is no space for a bold font in a 6x12 matrix. However, the "normal" font is somewhere between.

Q. The font works in X11/Motif, but not in GNOME/KDE/Xfce.

A. Try adding 75-yes-terminus.conf to the Fontconfig configuration files. See also: mkfontscale(1), mkfontdir(1), fc-cache(1), xorg.conf(5), xfs(1), xlsfonts(1), fonts-conf(5) etc.

Q. The Windows executable contains a virus!

A. With millions of Windows threats (at least signatures), and 40+ different scanners, the false positives are not rare. The executable is a valid zip archive, so you can open it and extract terminus.fon instead of running the installer. Or you can check it at Jotti Virusscan, VirusTotal etc.

Legal information

Terminus Font is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1. The license is included as OFL.TXT, and is also available with a FAQ at http://scripts.sil.org/OFL

The font includes two variants of unicode range 2800-28FF, but does not support Braille in any way.

The files configure, configure.help, bdftopsf.pl, ucstoany.pl, fcp.c and terminus.nsi are distributed under the GNU General Public License version 2.0 or (at your choice) any later version.

THE END