ZXSpectrum.ttf V1.0 (International)
The Font This font is based on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum ROM character set and it’s 8×8 grid. It is released as healthware, which means that if you use it, you will live through a happy and joyful life. (Like the joke about milk – Why is milk healthy? If you drink it for 1200 months, you’ll live for 100 years 😉 No money, no postcards, no email, no fuss at all. Just use it for everything you want, sell it as your own work of art :)) change it as you like, anything. But than again, if you ever print it in a magazine or do something useful with it, I’d love to see that… if it is no bother to you, send me a scan or just email to let me know – [e-mail address omitted].
The Story At first, I wanted to make only 110 original characters of the char set. Than I realized that I really *needed* our 10 national characters in it, and the rest was easy… 😉 The Characters it supports several Unicode ranges (according to Microsoft Font Properties extension for Windows 95):
Basic Latin Latin-1
Supplement Latin Extended-A
Basic Greek Cyrillic
and more than a few Code pages
1252 Latin 1 1250 Latin 2:
East Europe 1251
Cyrillic 1253
Greek 1254
Turkish 1257
Windows Baltic
Windows OEM Character Set
869 IBM
Greek 866
MS-DOS
Russian 865
MS-DOS
Canadian French 861
MS-DOS Icelandic 860
MS-DOS Portuguese 857
MS-DOS IBM
Turkish 855
IBM Cyrillic;
Primarily Russian 852
Latin 2 775
MS-DOS Baltic 737
G 850 WE/Latin 1 437 US
I’m not very experienced in foreign characters and there’s a big possibility that I made some of the chars ugly or mistaken, so if you notice something bad, some pixel missed or added or even a whole character wrong, please email me. (I didn’t even proof test the font in the real world until now and I noticed that I don’t like zcaron – one of the 10 chars that made me do the whole job! So there’s certainly gonna be another version, but not very soon – say, with 10 or 20 chars to edit?)
There are 652 glyphs in it, even ff, fl, ffi and ffl ligatures – everything I found around, and it is nowhere near kern (big thanks to Emigre, for inspiring my life and sending me free posters). There are no italic or bold versions so far, but I am thinking of the bold version (ROR, OR A, if anyone remembers… there will be some really cool characters in it!). Thanks I’d like to thank Bojan Stojanovic for some essential info on how to set up Fontographer, and Dragan Petrovic for digging my Spectrum cassettes out of the dust. I’d also like to thank Sir Clive Sinclair for creating the best computer ever (at least in my heart). Darone
long live spectrum!