STSC (c) APL Dos box bitmap fonts

[page last modified 2016-05-29]

Here are a few OEM codepage bitmap fonts suitable for use with old versions of STSC (c) APL ("old" in this case means back from the early 90's).  Today those APL versions can still be coaxed into running in a Dos box under various flavors of Windows.  To do that one needs to begin with an appropriate font, with the correct APL characters where STSC decided they should be.

There are other Dos box fonts available that will do the same thing; notably there's a few in Paul Jackson's pljtools.zip (http://plj541.github.io/Tools/).  The fonts found here offer other resolutions, with thicker APL characters that can be easier to read in higher resolution screen modes.

To install, download and expand the zipfile at link below.  This will produce the file stscapl.fon.  Then perform  Start->Settings->Control Panel->Fonts -> Install New Font.  Point to the  stscapl.fon  file and click OK.  That's it!

If you now configure the font properties of a Dos box you should see some additional raster fonts available, in the ROWxCOL dimensions 16x12, 17x12, 18x12 and 20x14.  When you highlight one of these, the "selected font" name will appear as  STSC-APL-RRxCC, where RRxCC is the ROWxCOL dimension.

The 12 column fonts are all the same, with an empty row added to the bottom to form the 17 row font, and another to the top to form the 18 row font.  The 14 column is different (more recent and perhaps not as polished); it's useful for higher resolution displays.  I use the 20 column font currently with a 1280 x 1024 (cols x rows) Windows display resolution; this gives me a 50 line APL window that fits the screen well.

There are probably only a handful (if that) of people this might be useful to.  Still, here they are.  If you want to make changes to the fonts, run down a copy of the "softy" font editor.  Last time I looked, you could get it here: http://www.massmind.org/techref/member/softy-font/index.html

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Click here to download  stscfon.zip


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