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What is the aspect ratio of a mono font that's made for terminal use, or more specifically, the size of the cell that any single character would fill?

I've read that a standard terminal is 80x24 columns by rows, and that the standard terminal screen is 4:3.

So, considering that information:

Each cell is 4/80ths of the screen's width, or 1/20th, and each cell is 3/24ths of the screen's height, or 1/8.

1/20:1/8 = 1:20/8 = 1:2.5

Does this sound right?

I'm curious because I would like to make a few games for iOS, and I would like to emulate the feeling of a terminal and I believe dimensions are important.

polym
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DevinM
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    That's a really good question! Now if you add CJK (east asian) characters to the mix, those are exactly twice the width of normal characters in monospaced fonts suitable for terminal use. So by your calculation the aspect ratio for those characters would be 2:2.5. Yet I've heard that 漢字 are technically supposed to be perfectly square! – Celada Aug 06 '14 at 00:40

1 Answers1

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Terminals didn't all have the same aspect ratio and didn't all have square pixels. So if you pick the aspect ratio of one model, it won't match other models.

The popular VT220 had a 8x10 character cell. The earlier VT05 had a 8¾" × 6⅝" display area, and a 72x20 size, and a 5x7 character cell. The site vt100 has a lot of manuals of DEC text terminals, you can surely find information for other models.

Either pick a sensible monospace low-resolution font, or implement options so that players can choose their favorite terminal models. Note that the number of pixels per character is so low that you'll have to blow up the characters to make them visible at all.

Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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