[Trac #1383] larger console font

[Zarro Boogs per Child]

#1383: larger console font
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 Reporter:  AlbertCahalan  |        Owner:  dilinger
     Type:  enhancement    |       Status:  new     
 Priority:  low            |    Milestone:  BTest-4 
Component:  distro         |   Resolution:          
 Keywords:                 |  
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Changes (by wmb at firmworks.com):

  * type:  defect => enhancement

Comment:

 I built a test version of OFW with the 15x30 font.  It looks pretty good.
 I'll let other people have a look at it to see what they think before
 committing.  The existing font (Sun Gallant 12x22) is quite readable in
 the firmware environment, with its black text on a white background, but
 harder for me to read in the Linux console environment where the text is
 gray and the contrast is thus lower.

 Regardless of whether we decide to use the Sun font or 15x30 for OFW, I
 plan to switch to 15x30 for the memtest86 that is in the firmware, because
 I have a lot of trouble reading the Sun font in memtest, with its blue
 background.

 One minor disadvantage of the 15x30 font is that it only gives 51
 characters per line on a 1024x768 external display.  But that probably
 doesn't matter very much because recent board builds rarely have the
 external display connector populated.

 There is also a minor decrease in firmware text rendering speed with the
 larger font, but that is probably not worth worrying about; the dominant
 bottleneck is scrolling, and if we needed to improve firmware text
 performance, we could use the graphics processor.

-- 
Ticket URL: <http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/1383#comment:4>
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