@刘柏坤
Personal computers were born in the 1970s and became popular from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s. However, when computers spread to East Asia, they encountered a huge language barrier: Chinese characters. We use Chinese characters, which are indispensable in our daily life. If the computer cannot use Chinese characters, it will not be able to function at all. Therefore, inputting, displaying, storing, and printing Chinese characters on a personal computer has become a top priority.
Author: Creative Commons
01. Chinese characters in the computer
Computers were born in the West. People who are used to using pinyin letters do not understand the way of Chinese characters, and their design does not take into account the tens of thousands of characters in oriental characters. There is no way to deal with it. As early as the beginning of the 20th century, some people advocated the elimination of Chinese characters and the full use of letters. Since the advent of computers, this argument has reappeared that any text that does not use letters cannot be adapted to computers. Fortunately, people who use Chinese characters in the world thought of a good solution to solve the problems of encoding and input methods. If so, what is still owed is only the font.
The earliest popular computer Chinese fonts, like computer English fonts, are bitmap fonts. As the name suggests, its principle is to array "dots" into text shapes. The principle of dot-matrix characters is to display the shape of characters in the form of "dots" in a square or rectangle composed of several rows and columns, and build the characters point by point.
For example, "16-dot font" is to build the shape of Chinese characters with dots in a 16×16 square matrix. Theoretically, if the square matrix is used to create characters, the size of the finished Chinese characters should be 16×16. However, this method will make the Chinese characters at the back stick together with the Chinese characters at the front, and there will be no gap between the two characters, making it difficult to read. Therefore, the general "16-point font" will only be made into a size of 16×15, such as the character "pay" in the example.
02. Dot matrix characters in DOS environment
The popular operating system of personal computers in this period is still DOS (disk operating system, Disk Operating System) that relies on text instructions. Operating System). In most cases, the user can enter the Chinese system environment only by entering the command to execute the Chinese system in the DOS environment. For example, the most famous Yitian Chinese system at that time required typing "ET3" in the DOS environment and pressing the Enter key to start it. Earlier personal computers even needed an additional Chinese processing card to display Chinese.
The Chinese system built in the DOS environment uses dot matrix characters like DOS itself, which is also very reasonable. What do dot matrix characters of different sizes look like? Here are some examples:
In the legend, we can easily see that as long as the square space is larger, the shape that can be created will be finer. In a smaller space, characters with many strokes often need to reduce some strokes to keep them clear. But after the square space is enlarged, not only do you not have to do such a thing, but you can also modify the oblique strokes such as left and right strokes more carefully, reducing the dog teeth or jaggedness seen after enlarging the font.
The designers of these Chinese systems also worked hard to improve the font quality. In addition to the 16-point font (the dot matrix size is 16×16 or 16×15) preset by the system, 24 dots (the dot matrix size is 24×24), 32 dots (the dot matrix size is 32×32 or 32 ×31), even fonts with 64 dots (the dot matrix size is 64×64), and 128 dots (the dot matrix size is 128×128).
03. The words are exquisite, but also fattened
The problem is that the larger the dot space, the larger the file size. Generally speaking, at that time, a set of 24-point fonts took up about 1MB, 36-point fonts took up about 1.7MB, 48-point fonts took up about 3.6MB, 64-point fonts already took up about 6.5MB, and 128-point fonts even took up about 25.6MB! At that time, the popular hard disk only had a capacity of 20MB (and it was a luxury), and it couldn't even hold a set of 128-point fonts!
Therefore, even if everyone was not satisfied with 16-point fonts, the common dot matrix characters at that time were only 24-point fonts. At that time, the six sets of 24-point fonts of Ming, Hei, Yuan, Kai, Li, and Xing in the Yitian Chinese system required three large disks. As for the 36-point and 48-point fonts, they are already luxury items.
The picture below is the result of simulating the 16-point, 24-point, and 36-point characters of Kai, Li, and Fangsong fonts by software. The dot matrix in it has not been manually modified and improved. Although different font styles can be made in the dot matrix range, the 16-point font is obviously not clear enough. Even if the dot matrix is larger, the characters with more strokes are still not clear enough, and the edges are inevitably jagged, which is not beautiful enough.
04. In the era of retina screens, there is still a stage for dot matrix characters
Font technology has entered a new era, it will directly draw the outline of the text, no need to Composition with dots. But dot matrix characters still have a place to play. Because when displaying a small font size, if the resolution of the screen is not high, the characters enclosed by the frame cannot be displayed in detail, and the strokes will be blurred as a result. Therefore, in the Windows (window) system or mobile phone operating system that emerged after DOS, dot matrix characters are often attached to the default fonts to display small font sizes.
The editor also lists a few dot matrix fonts here:
1. Founder pixel 16
2. Mona Fan Fang Lattice
3. Mona complex circle dot matrix
4. Aura dot matrix Song font
Articles are uploaded by users and are for non-commercial browsing only. Posted by: Lomu, please indicate the source: https://www.daogebangong.com/en/articles/detail/Computer%20Chinese%20character%20tracing%20dot%20matrix%20characters.html
支付宝扫一扫 
评论列表（196条）
测试