Discussion:
Prevent PCOMM stretching TrueType fonts?
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Graham Hannington
2019-01-08 05:46:04 UTC
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In IBM Personal Communications (PCOMM), I have chosen a vector (TrueType) display font, IBM Plex Mono, as opposed to a raster/bitmap font such as IBM3270.

PCOMM stretches (condenses or expands) the characters of TrueType fonts to fit the PCOMM window.

Can I prevent PCOMM stretching TrueType fonts? Without resorting to maximizing the PCOMM window?

Maximizing the PCOMM window grays-out the Font option under Edit > Preferences > Appearance. And the font characters in that maximized window appear, to my eye, to be unstretched; at least, in a 24x80 session on my 23-inch monitor.

Alternatively, is there a way to explicitly specify a font "stretch factor"; for example, in the LastExitView profile settings?

I understand that I could prevent PCOMM from stretching characters by selecting a bitmap font instead. However, here, I'm particularly interested in using a TrueType font; specifically, IBM Plex Mono. For some background on this use case, see the following comment in GitHub:

https://github.com/IBM/plex/issues/93#issuecomment-414675179

A related question: can someone explain, or point me to documentation for, the details of the LastExitView profile setting? For example, for my session A:

A=3 382 97 1548 809 5 13 27 400 1 IBM Plex Mono— 1047

I get that "A" is the session, "IBM Plex Mono" is the font, and "1047" is the code page, but I'm unclear about the other values; I imagine they might include screen coordinates and/or window width and height.

I'm using PCOMM Version 12.0.

Graham Hannington
Graham Hannington
2019-01-09 07:02:53 UTC
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Maximizing the PCOMM window ... characters ... appear, to my eye, to be unstretched
I was wrong.

I've compared unstretched IBM Plex Mono characters, in another application, with characters in a maximized PCOMM window. The characters in PCOMM are stretched.

I have other techniques for capturing PCOMM sessions—as rich text rather than bitmaps—that enable me to represent 3270 screens in IBM Plex Mono without stretching, but that doesn't help me when I want to capture PCOMM sessions as bitmaps. For example, when recording a PCOMM session for a video. I sometimes simulate a recorded PCOMM session using a sequence of rich-text captures; so, yes, I could do that if I wanted to avoid font stretching. Or I could record a video using a terminal emulator that didn't stretch fonts. Really, though, I want to tell PCOMM: stop stretching TrueType fonts!
Graham Hannington
2019-01-29 08:56:51 UTC
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With apologies to anyone who thinks I'm flogging a dead horse, I thought I'd attempt some closure on this thread...

I believe the following to be true:

- PCOMM distorts TrueType fonts (that are used as the PCOMM display font)

- By "distorts", I mean "stretches; changes the aspect ratio of"

- PCOMM does this to make the terminal screen contents fit inside the PCOMM window

- There's no way for a user to tell PCOMM not to do this; no way to tell PCOMM to display TrueType fonts in their original aspect ratio

I'd be happy to be shown otherwise.

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