Welcome, teletext fanatics! I'll just leave this here...

Monday 1 October 2007

Teletext and the home computer

The page linked below is a relatively new one and offers the chance to "enjoy teletext whilst it is still around". It mentions the service will probably stay for subtitling but I think this will also perhaps be phased out to interactive TV.

The real reason I include this page is some of the imagery. Nice use of the teletext aesthetic for headings and a very descriptive animated gif test page.



Win TTX - Teletext for Windows 95/98


Incidentally, note that the font in this image is different to the one found in my screencaps and also the ones from Teletext Then and Now. I believe this is down to encoding of individual television screens and maybe their resolutions.

On Windows computer systems, there is a selection of typefaces built for Teletext viewing - a series of .ttf fixed width character sets. These are named wst_engl, wst_ital, wst_germ etc. to reflect the characters of different languages. I presume these are named after World System Teletext.

Again, however, this is only relevant to Windows systems and it does not exist on Mac systems. Here is a slight difference between the teletext and computer formats: teletext was standardised to one type, whereas there exist many computer browsers and operating systems.

This is interesting - Microsoft programmed them in expecting the mediums of the home PC and teletext to converge at some point. This prediction was partially correct.

0 comments: