I decided to have a play with UTF-8 last night, and it's actually remarkably easy to use. It may not be as good as a specialised mud font, but I think the extended character set would certainly allow you to make better-looking maps than the pure ASCII ones, and there are various other characters that could also be put to good use (gender symbols, weather symbols, lines, runes, alchemy symbols, etc).

The drawback of course is that you need a client that supports UTF-8. MUSHclient does, but you have to explicitly set the option and switch to a Unicode font - and as far as I can see, none of the Unicode fonts it comes with are fixed-width.

I've heard the argument that variable-width fonts look better, and in general I agree, but when you're displaying maps and tables you really need them to be exactly aligned. In theory the information could all be moved to miniwindows, but then you're into custom plugin territory; if you're going to require a download then IMO you might as well go the whole hog and draw proper graphics.

What I'm really looking for here is an option that doesn't require any special downloads (by "special" I mean downloads for a specific mud), and it does look as though this could be a decent compromise between ASCII and a custom mud font - particularly if it could be autodetected and enabled by the mud (although obviously there'd need to be a way to switch it off for those who don't want it).

One of my motives here is to provide nicer maps for those who don't or won't use a graphical plugin. But even for those who do, I don't think it would be wasted effort, as there are various symbols that could be used to good effect in the text window.

However I'm not sure what sort of support there is among clients. Is this going to be another one of those things that only MUSHclient users can really take advantage of?

You can use \e%G to force a console into UTF-8 mode, and \e%@ to place it back into the default mode. I've never looked too deeply into UTF-8 detection but there are several consoles that support it (WinTin++'s default console does), and I think most XTERM reporting consoles do), and the fonts are obviously fixed width.

For checking if a console supports UTF-8 box drawing characters using tintin:

#showme {\e%G}

#forall {9;A} {#forall {0;1;2;3;4;5;6;7;8;9;A;B;C;D;E;F} {#showme \xE2\x95\x&0&&0}}

Very useful Scandum, thanks - the results may not be quite as nice as using a custom mud font, but in combination with 256 colours I think this could provide far better results than the typical ASCII map, without the user needing to download and install anything extra.

Autodetection would be a big bonus though, in my opinion, particularly when it comes to giving newbies a good first impression. I'm guessing this would be a similar problem to detecting 256 colour support though? Perhaps even worse, as even if (say) WinTin++ supports UTF-8, some users might have changed their font, and there'd be no way for the mud to find out.

Mudlet is remarkably close to full Unicode support. If there is a real demand for this then it could be patched in.

Other things seem to be higher priority to most users though.

Auto-detection.. I imagine it would have to be a manually configured thing. Off-hand I can't think of an easy way to do that.

Creating a true type drawing font is a lot of work, though if there was one good font with good documentation it could be quite useful to a lot of MUDs. I'd do it if I didn't have 10 other hobby projects lined up. Maybe if enough server developers show an interest someone could be motivated to give it a try, it'd be more rewarding than running a server for 3 players. I created a 64 character drawing set a while back for drawing n e s w u d ne se sw nw exits that'd be very useful for drawing in game maps for builders, some kind of community effort would be required to put together a decent wilderness drawing set.

Auto detection is tricky, if you query TTYPE twice TinTin++ will report TINTIN++, and the actual terminal type on the second query. The WinTin++ build should report XTERM, though I've got to admit I never got around to testing it. I've been thinking about creating a standard, but so far haven't bothered because I doubt it'd get adopted.

I like the idea, but I think it would be extremely difficult to get the community to work together, particularly at this stage. However if there was already a font available, and we could convince a few clients to include it with their distribution, we might see muds starting to use it - and at that point they'd have a vested interest in helping to expand it.

What did you use to create your drawing set? I've been thinking of trying out something like FontCreator, as that would let me import bitmap images, and I could probably convince some of my players to help provide those.

I created the first draft in a text file, then used a bitmap font editor. I couldn't get any of the bitmap font editors to generate a font that worked properly with PuTTY however, and I don't think any of them are UTF8 capable.

Here are some screenshots:

http://www.mudbytes.net/index.php?a=topi...

In my opinion the only viable option is to use a true type font.

From what I gathered FontCreator is indeed the best choice for creating a true type font, if it does import bitmaps it might be a little easier to create a font.

I'd be interested in adding support for a drawing font to TinTin++'s auto mapper, preferably using the 64 character set I created as it allows treating exits as bit fields making tile selection a formula so you don't need to use a lookup table.

One obvious improvement would be adding tiles for displaying up and down exits, but that would require 128 characters and probably larger bitmaps to draw a little + for up and a - for down on the tile.

I'm not familiar with creating bitmap images, but I know you are. Possibly you could come up with a plain text format and write a converter? I wouldn't mind spending some time on creating 128 exit drawing tiles.

The ideal situation would be to find a decent Public Domain font that can be used as a starting point, so that it could just be extended with mud-specific symbols. I really think Unicode is the way to go here, anything else would be too limited.

I also stumbled across Fixedsys Excelsior, which looks like it might have potential. It's restricted to 12pt/16px, but seems to cover quite a lot of characters.

Liberation Mono is a GPL Courier New equivalent. Might be tough finding a decent public domain replacement.

I'm not technically opposed to a GPL font, I'm just not sure what impact it would have on any non-GPL clients that wished to include it with their distribution.

I had a play with Fixedsys Excelsior last night, and the results aren't bad, although the bold characters are slightly wider than the regular ones (you can avoid them if you're using XTerm colours though). The rook chess piece is pretty good for buildings, and there are various other symbols that could be put to good use, although there's also a lot of language stuff that I can't see many people caring about.

I've not downloaded the demo version of FontCreator yet, but will do so soon.

The reaction from MUSHclient and Mudlet looks cautiously optimistic, but the font would need to be actively used by several muds before they'd seriously consider supporting it.

Until then, MUSHclient users could still download and install the font manually, and they can even use CHARSET to determine if UTF-8 support is activated. I'll probably just pack it into my snippet as a bonus feature, I think muds would be more likely to use the option if they already supported it.

It's fairly easy to install and use a font on Windows so I think it'll take off even if clients don't come shipped with it.

The way I'd like the font to work is to use 2 characters for each drawing as that'll come closer to a square.

In order to access 2 byte characters some existing characters will need to be overwritten, so that's something that needs to be determined, I'm fine with only supporting West European languages.

Possible tile sets include:

- 128 multi-exit drawing tiles.
- River drawing tiles
- Chess drawing tiles
- Playing card drawing tiles
- Wilderness drawing tiles
- Shape drawing tiles

It'll be a bit of work, mucho drama, and probably too much work if FontCreator doesn't have a good bitmap converter.

I've just done that for now. I think I'll wait and see how well the snippet is received before looking into a custom mud font.

Re: fonts, considered working with Constructium? They are open to adding new, constructed fonts, etc, in fact, that is exactly what it is designed for.

Constructium font

I really love the range of support, but I dislike the western character set in the Gentium font very, very badly.

The day any mud server changes my console/terminal font or language without my explicit permission is the day I tell everyone I know to avoid it like the plague.

While it might be fine and dandy to do this for a MUD client that runs on its own, I use my terminal windows for other things besides playing muds, and having some arbitrary escape sequence hijack my ability to do other things without having to reset the console is just plain rude.

Also, there are quite a few fonts out there which don't support UTF-8 characters, even if the underlying terminal supports it. For those fonts, choosing to display some arbitrary symbol will just result in a blank space, a question mark, or whatever else the default character code is for "I don't recognized that".

Soooo, while having a command that explicitly enables UTF-8 stuff is fine, and if there's a reliable way to detect that both the terminal AND the font support it, great… but sending escape codes that might screw people up seems even worse than assuming every terminal does vt100 properly.

Nobody is talking about hijacking terminal / console fonts. I don't even think that's possible. I don't even think you can change the point size, much less the font. Maybe some crazy xterm supports that for shits and giggles, but I wouldn't want that "feature" either.

What is possible is to have a user voluntarily install a font which you provide on a website, and create a terminal profile which uses it to connect to a mud which has extra features (automap tiles, custom languages, etc) installed in that font.

Actually, Telgar….



That won't change the font, but it WOULD change the encoding, which might well screw up your terminal… especially if you get disconnected or the MUD in question doesn't bother to set it back on logout.

Yah, that's a not very friendly Xterm specific sequence. \e%@ gets you back to default character set.

Still possible to screw up your terminal. That's why I instead send:



From there on, I know if Unicode works (incidentally, I also support Windows default MS/DOS code page, I should upgrade the handling to ask an appropriate question for that if Windows telnet is detected).

Individual code points can be toggled on or off by the player