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[Day Brown <daybrown AT hypertech.net>]

Dos starts with the fonts that are written on the ROM BIOS chips of
every video card:
25x40, 25x80, 50x80. However, there are a large variety of text mode dos
fonts that can be downloaded, and several tools if you want to alter or
create your own.

I did this some years ago, replacing the rarely used foreign letters and
junk with geometric shapes and line segments. Using ANSI sys, people had
long made colored logon screens and menus for BBSes, and there are large
archives you can still download of 'ANSI graphics'.  It is Ironic that I
could take the Linux penguin ANSI graphic, and smooth out all the edges
so that it looks about the same as any other cartoon, on a DOS
screen.... but you cant do this in Linux.

I would be happy if someone would prove me wrong, but in the first
place, most users have no clue how to change the default consol from the
standard 25x80 to either 50x80 or 25x40, much less install a preferred
custom font, and even then, AFAIK, he hasta be root. But could this be
done in BL with 'vga=80x50' rather than, as cited 'vga=ask'   ...?

And then there's the question of color; I see in MC and bash's LS, that
filenames or whatever can be in different colors.  But- how would one
display an ANSI color graphic? If one uses LESS or whatever, will it
display ANSI color codes correctly? Or- better yet, much better, is
there a way to get Linux to display each byte of the video rom with the
appropriate color code, where the first byte of the hexadecimal is the
background, the second the foreground? A lotta DOS text mode games didnt
use ANSI, too slow and buggy, but used the INT 10 char/attr subroutines
with arrays in the video ram.

I have an artistic work which presents well in DOS text mode, but dunno
if it is feasible to port to Linux.  As alluded to, the scale of a font
has a considerable, and variable impact on the user depending on his
hardware and visual acuity.  GUIs offer the abilty to render screens in
an unreadable fashion.  I have some screens which are like poetry, with
certain words in certain places amid a certain amount of white space,
with the *shape* of the paragraphs an essential element. No scrollbars,
no buttons, no clutter, nothing to distract the user but the content of
the actual quoted passages as I intended them. I dunno how to do that
with a GUI.