Spleen 2.0.0 released with full CP437 support

Spleen 2.0.0 has been released, with full support for CP437 (IBM PC) encoding in the 8x16, 16x32, and 32x64 versions.

It required a large effort and represents 135 commits since Spleen 1.9.3 which resulted in almost 90 new characters in the previously mentioned sizes.

A lot has happened since the 1.0.0 release back in September 2018:

• It became the default font for OpenBSD consoles in January 2019
• It was imported in the NetBSD src tree in March 2019
• It was included in the FreeBSD base system in May 2023

Spleen's README now has a trivia section listing all the operating systems and programs where the fonts have been embedded or bundled in.

But let's go back to the newly announced release and focus on the recently introduced changes.

Here is a screenshot of the CP437 version of 16x32:

This is an important milestone as it allows nice things like having a DOS version of Spleen. It is implemented as a COM file changing the font to Spleen 8x16, and has been tested both in DOSBox and on FreeDOS.

Here is "L'Étranger" from Baudelaire using Spleen on an ASUS Eee PC running FreeDOS:

On top on that, Spleen is now also available in libansilove since version 1.4.0 and in Ansilove since version 4.2.0, making it possible to render ANSI art using a modern font.

And with this out of the way, I can now start working on the next Spleen milestone, which I hope to be able to announce in a not so distant future... Stay tuned!