karstenw/geosLib

Mapping GEOS fonts to their nearest modern equivalents

Opened this issue · 3 comments

Neat project. I was looking through your code to learn how it worked and spotted your "work in progress" regarding fonts.

Some rough equivalents would be:

GEOS Font Modern Font
Barrows Courier
Birge Mistral
California Helvetica
Callaghan Stencil
Cory Data 70
Dwinelle Old English
LeConte Mactype
Lewis Playbill
Ormond Microgramma Extended
Oxford Monotype Tektura
Roma Times
Superb Broadway
Tolman Comic Sans

Also, the GEOS Font Pack I Manual has been preserved as a PDF. It contains printouts of every font in the collection. You could probably match up font equivalents by eye, given enough time. It appears there was a 2nd font pack, but I can't put my hands on it or the manual.

I updated the fontmapping dict with your suggestions but it's still unused. In the meantime this catalog became available:
https://www.lyonlabs.org/commodore/onrequest/geos/geoFont.pdf

Perhaps it could serve as a fontID reference.

I'm still looking for descriptions of the following file formats:

  • geoPublish
  • geoCalc
  • geoFile

That's a very good idea @karstenw.

I'm new to Python. Among other things I want to use it to look "under the hood" at old binary formats so that I can understand them, including old GEOS files. I've tried to dig up a formal geoPublish format specification without any luck.

At this point I'm in the early stages of trying to understand geoPublish files specifically with little more than a hex editor and a notebook. I'll be glad to share my notes and any test code with you. Is there somewhere specific you'd like me to post my notes?

Writing an issue here would be fine.

At least I revisited geosLib today and fixed a crash in the font converter.