To Luiz (HP-41 extended char set font)

[Gerson W. Barbosa]

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Gerson.

[Vieira, Luiz C. (Brazil)]

Hey, Gerson;

thanks for taking the time to try them out and, mainly, to 'build' such post... Amazing!

Best regards.

Luiz.

(in time: did not post your books yet... Shame on me! To plead X-mas is guilty for that would not be an honest excuse...)

Edited: 26 Dec 2005, 2:34 p.m.

[Gerson W. Barbosa]

Hello Luiz,

Don't you worry about the books. I know you've been busy lately. Anyway, it'll take long before I have the time to read them.

About the post, to be honest, it was not built by hand. I wanted to post a Christmas message using HP-41 characters. I tried to do it by hand but it was harder than I had imagined. Writing a small QBasic program for the task proved to be much easier :-)

At first, I had included only the standard 41 character set. I had trouble designing the lower characters as I haven't been able to find any commercial 14-segment display decoder table with low case letters. These seem to be difficult to implement even on 16-segment displays. When I remembered to take look at your 41 font, I noticed at least sixteen letters matched your set, including 'j', 's', 'z' and 'y'. Now, out of curiosity, how have you come up with the extended set? Have you built it all by yourself or have you received suggestions then?

Best regards,

Gerson.

[Vieira, Luiz C. (Brazil)]

Hi, Gerson; (Ê nóis no 'thread'...)

First of all, congratulations! I have some knowledge on BASIC, but I'd never be able to go that deep on character handling...

About the HP41 extended character set: when I first announced my fonts here at the MoHPC Forum (late 2001), I had only siv, maybe seven fonts ready. I told the guys I was creating others, then Gordon Dyer (U.K.) sent me an image from one HP-related publication (HPCC, I guess) showing all of the lower-case characters as they are shown in the halfnut LCD when programming accordingly. After that I draw the X-tended character set so users could either use the standard character set or the extended, depending on their application. The other TTF files where created almost in the same period of time.

The first time I actually saw the HP41 LCD lowercase characters was a couple of months ago, when trying some ROM's out with Meindert's MLDL2000. Ángel Martin's Sandbox 3d uses lowercase headers that can only be fully read with a halfnut. A [CAT] 2 in a fullnut with the Sandbox ROM would show

[-Sa db   3d ]

as the first header instead of

[-Sandbox 3d ]

normaly read with a halfnut.

Time passes and the HP41 never ceases to amaze us...

Best regards.

Luiz (Brazil)

Edited: 26 Dec 2005, 11:22 p.m.

[Gerson W. Barbosa]

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[Vieira, Luiz C. (Brazil)]