Comment by dphnx

Comment by dphnx 3 days ago

6 replies

Ah, so the characters we’re seeing here are twice as wide as they would be when printed? Adding some CSS to compress the page horizontally looks a lot closer to the first image you shared:

  html {
    transform: scaleX(50%);
  }
wiredfool 2 days ago

The font on the page is definitely too wide -- it should be taller than wide, and 10 characters per inch.

  • mark-r 2 days ago

    I'm not sure the original MX-80 had square dots. Since they made this to be pixel accurate, the aspect ratio might be off because the MX-80 was off.

    The key test is not how it looks on screen, but how it looks printed.

    • wiredfool 2 days ago

      My recollection is that the dots were round on my dot matrix. But it also used a typewriter ribbon, so there was a bit of texture from that.

      • mark-r a day ago

        Good point, the dots were produced by pins that were round. What I meant to say was that the spacing might have been different in the two directions.

        • wiredfool 16 hours ago

          Yes, I’m sure they would be. Especially since the same font would have been used for normal width (10 characters per inch) and compressed (17 cpi).

LocalH 2 days ago

I played with it a bit and 65% or so seemed more accurate to my memories