Atari accentuated font

[pfeuh]

Hello,

 

I've used in the early 80's the cartridge Atari Writer or Atari Text, I don't remember, but I could write French text. 35 years later, I would like to use a 800XL to generate a credits scrolling (not sure of the words) to use in some vintage looking videos. The scrolling works perfectly since 80's on the 800XL, but concerning French extra characters, I would like to get an official atari font for this, to locate all extra characters. I suppose that these characters overwrites the graphical character and that the whole accentued set stays in indexes 0-127 and in the 1K size . Do you know where I can get one?

 

The idea is to generate comfortably a scrolled text on a PC (python + tkinter), write it on a disk, play it on a real 800XL and video record it with a SECAM to UBS numerizer... But I just miss this font.

 

Another question (a kind if nice to have) is: Is there an Atari style font for PC with this extra characters? I've found a lot, but only with classic characters.

 

 

 

 

Edited July 13, 2020 by pfeuh

[Preppie]

Lot of fonts here https://github.com/TheRobotFactory/EightBit-Atari-Fonts

 

Not sure if any are what you're after but 'EightBit Atari-AWP' has some accents.

[pfeuh]

Thanks for this link. I've cloned this github repository and had a look. Unfortunately, under Ubuntu, only a few fonts load. For them which load, they don't look as in the "Sample" directory.

 

I've found an accentued font I used in the 80's... But I don't remember if it is one of mine or an official one. It's important because if somebody wants to change the font, accentued characters have to be always at the same place. Does somebody know this font?

Edited July 13, 2020 by pfeuh
scoop

[+David_P]

On the XL/XE series, that is the second system font, replacing the CONTROL characters.  It's stored at $CC00-CFFF.

 

[pfeuh]

Thanks, you make my day!

[pfeuh]

I can't identify these two characters... Any idea?

 

 

 

 

 

[StickJock]

The one on the left looks like an upside-down exclamation point.  ¡Wow!

[+DjayBee]

The second one is the standard pipe-symbol "|"

[StickJock]

Odd that they have the inverted exclamation point, but not the inverted question mark.  ¿Why not?

 

[ivop]

It could also be the capital dotted i

 

Capital without dot: I i

Capital with dot: İ i

 

The capital dotted İ was also part of ISO 8859-3 back in '88. Latin alphabet and Turkish.

 

The Turkish language also has an undotted i (ı), which when overlooked, can get you killed.

 

[StickJock]

That makes sense.  I would think that if it were the ¡ then they would also have the ¿ to match it, so it maybe it is the İ character. 

 

But then again, why didn't they draw it like the regular I but shorter?  Why is it missing the bars on the top & bottom of it?

 

[ivop]

That's a good question. All other characters with accents are more or less similar to the original font. Even capitals, like É. Perhaps it's an upside down exclamation mark after all.

 

I wonder who designed the Atari 8-bit font, and the international character set. Does anybody know?

 

[+DjayBee]

The "long line" character is in the exact place of the pipe symbol ($7C) and also looks like the pipe symbol in the non-international ATASCII character set.

[phaeron]

There are bits of comments from the XLOS listing that indicate what each character was supposed to be, suggesting that $60 is indeed the inverted exclamation mark for Spanish:

 

[dmsc]

Hi!

1 hour ago, phaeron said:

There are bits of comments from the XLOS listing that indicate what each character was supposed to be, suggesting that $60 is indeed the inverted exclamation mark for Spanish:

 

 

That is funny, because the forgot to include the i-acute "í", so you can't correctly write "sí, así el más mínimo maní desató al alérgico"  

 

Seriously, the "non ASCII" characters in Spanish sorted by usage are á, í, é, ñ, ó, ú, ü, ¿ and ¡, so including the "¡" that is almost never used instead of the 'í' sounds really strange.

 

Perhaps they wanted to write "¡ay caramba!" or ""¡Arriba, arriba! ¡Ándale, ándale!"

 

Have Fun!

[StickJock]

Hmm.  Missing the ¡...  Must pre-date XL OS....

 

 

[pfeuh]

Thanks all for your feedbacks, they help!

 

After them, I think that the ($60) is not a reverted exclamation mark, because exclamation mark is not so tall. But DragonStomper has a really good argument with the piece of listing.

 

Maybe the ($7c) is the pipe symbol, because of its position and it's a useful character.

 

Not that easy. There are some characters not really useful to display text:

4 arrows $5c, $5d, $5e, $5f

1 escape

1 kind of return $7d

2 triangles $7e, $7f

---------------------------

8 total

 

These characters are not redefined in PC font Atari Classic Int, but this font has some other interesting characters that could be swaped, like in attached file  (first one seems to be the real reverted exclamation mark). I don't really know what to do.

 

The logical way should be to ignore these 8 extra characters to stay compatible with the default 800XL rom extended font, but it's easy to redefine them for the 800XL.

 

Another way should be to clone these 8 Atari characters and add them to the PC font Atari Classic Int, but it's not in my knowledge. I give me some time to think about it.

 

Edited July 17, 2020 by pfeuh
shell