[rob74]

Yeah, I really hated the standard IBM font too... trying to look like a serif font and having to "fall back" to sans serif most of the time anyway because there just wasn't enough space for the serifs... why?! And the patterns drawn with the standard background "pattern characters" looked horrible in the 80x25 mode which was used most of the time, because the hardware inserted an extra column repeating the 8th column, so the font matrix was actually 9x16, but the font didn't account for that.

Actually back in the bad old DOS days I went as far as realizing that it was really easy to replace the "default" font (at least on German/non-US machines, which installed a different font from a file which contained the correct characters for the German code page). So I wrote a small program to hack this code page file and insert my own sans-serif font. An additional realization was that 8 = 3+1+3+1 - so if you designed your "pattern characters" to have 2 "patterned" columns 3 pixels wide and 2 empty columns 1 pixel wide (so the repeated column would be empty too), the pattern would look nicer when shown in the 9x16 matrix. I wonder if I still have that laying around somewhere...