HaikuOS for Nostalgia Word Processing with Old MS-DOS Fonts

So in relation to me looking for old Word Processor applications, I started thinking and trying to determine the core reason or reasons that caused me to like old word processors. 

After giving it considerable thought, I started to conclude that maybe is was, oddly enough, the font used in the old word processors that actually caused me to like the old word processors.

Trying to find a font that is nostalgic to me. Some times one simply cannot get away from the things of old. And the things of old seem to be comforting, for some odd reason. 

So I started looking around the Internet for fonts. Since I started word processing with WordPerfect 4.3 way back in 1990 or so, I started there. WordPerfect 4.3 was a MS-DOS based application, so all of the typing was done in a MS-DOS interface with whatever font was used in MS-DOS. 


Searching the Internet for the MS-DOS font eventually landed me with a font named, "Code Page 437."  Font names commonly associated with and similar to this 437 font included Tahoma, Terminal, and Sans. There are other associated fonts, but these are the fonts I decided to focus on. 

I wrote most of this article in HaikuOS with the Calligra Words application. It had about four different Sans fonts but lacked the Tahoma and Terminal fonts. I ended up liking the Noto Sans Display font the most although there was very little difference between it and the other available Sans fonts. The Noto Sans Display font seems to have a little more spacing between the characters, thus making it easier for me to read. 

And it appears that this Noto Sans Display font is a good match for the old MS-DOS font of yesteryear. It is a very plain font, which I like as it is clear without all the extra dots and edges. I guess I simply like the plain look. It may be boring, but it is easier for me to read. And, according to an article at Microsoft regarding the Verdana font, the simpler fonts have been shown in research to be easier for people to read. So if simple fonts like Sans, Display, Tahoma, and Terminal are simple fonts, then may be best practice to use them in articles and such that people read on a regular basis. 

LibreOffice Writer is available for Haiku, so I tried it, too. With LibreOffice Writer I discovered an odd behavior. Even though LibreOffice Writer and Calligra Words both have the Noto Sans Display font and font sizes, LibreOffice Writer does not evenly space the characters out. Because of this there are some characters that are close to other characters, so words appeared squished together. Calligra Words does not have this problem of character spacing, so I chose Calligra Words to type this article. 


Later I did discover the Noto Sans Mono font in LibreOffice Writer, and that font seemed to space characters correctly, but by this time I was committed to use Calligra Words to continue writing this article.

In finding a font that matched that of WordPerfect 4.3 for MS-DOS, I then started to wonder if the colors of the word processor also influenced nostalgia feelings. But I think that will be explored in a separate article. 

At the end of this article when trying to copy and paste the contents from Calligra Words into Blogger.com in WebPositive, I encountered a problem: the text from the clipboard would not paste into the Blogger form.  I tried pasting the article content into LibreOffice Writer and even into StyledEdit, reselecting and copying from that app, then pasting into the Blogger form, but it still wouldn't paste the content. 

To get the content into Blogger, I had to save the Calligra Words document as an HTML document. Then I launched the PoorMan HTML server in Haiku. I coped the HTML file to the public_file folder for PoorMan. I then accessed the HTML file from Chrome in Windows by accessing the IP address of the Haiku VM. Once the HTML document was loaded in Chrome, I copied and pasted the content back into the Blogger form by using the "Type clipboard text" feature in Hyper-V. 

The challenges of alternative Operating Systems.

Until next time, happy computing.

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