I had the same problem, I made a 3x4 font that was just barely servicable for the initial project to show text on screen. It was my first (and only) font I ever made! Eventually I needed lower-case, so I turned those into lower-case and made a 3x5 variant for uppercase. It's still not ideal, and I'm sure when I announce my project, people will complain about it. So I've prepared to say "it's a stop-gap solution to make the OS servicable, but we can make more fonts."

I think people skimming a project often just don't quite get how much we pour into our projects, and how very much it cost us. But it's okay, they don't have to understand just how cool it is what we made. At least we know.

When I saw your video of your project, I was thinking to myself, "wow, that's incredibly cool, and I can relate to the steps he's doing!" Just trying to be the voice here of someone who thought that way, in case there are no others.

One can really get bogged down in fonts. (-:

http://jdebp.uk./Softwares/nosh/guide/terminal-resources.htm...

If you want a quick improvement over that 8by8 IBM ROM font, I suggest two things:

1. Switch to a 16by16 square.

2. For the ASCII range, go with one of the old home computer fonts, rather than IBM ROMs. Viznut has .hex files for Commodore PET and BBC Micro graphics modes squirrelled away inside Unscii.

I've done the work of upscaling the 8by8 PET font to 16by16, and it works quite nicely as a monospace square font. These old home computer fonts were of course designed to. Whereas in the world of VGA you're soon in trouble with glyphs designed for 9by16.

Supporting variable-width fonts is pretty easy on its own (if bit-packing, you might wish to store them vertically), but does complicate combining characters (remember, they go in different places and may need to make the new character larger).

For vector fonts, the interesting question is "if I render this at a different resolution and then scale it, will it line up?" which fundamentally has no answer that can satisfy everyone. Most other difficulties are merely a Small Matter of Coding (and providing appropriate APIs).