IBM i ACS 5250 EMULATOR FONT
What’s in a font? Lots of things make our life easier as IBM i Programmers. Working with a clean, easy to read 5250 terminal mode is one of the them.
I’m a big fan of Mochasoft terminal emulator, but growing appreciation for the new IBM i ACS (Access Client Solutions) with (1) its multi-tabbed approach to telnet sessions and (2) integrated IFS Explorer, SQL tool and more.
Access Client Solutions – ACS – what a stupid overly complicated name? Why didnt IBM just call it “IBM i Terminal” or something like that. Look at other products in this space: Putty, TN5250, Mochasoft, etc Putty is the one that sticks in your mind right? /rantover
Anyhooo, traditional IBM i Signon Sessions are presented as black screens with green text.
I prefer to use a white background with black text. This is easy to change by simply clicking EDIT > PREFERENCES > APPEARANCE > COLOR and changing the background color to white.
Then change the color for GREEN to something you find easy to read (black or a dark grey always looks good):
While I’m at it. I looked at all the available fonts this morning. I like the default IBM3270 but feel that there must be a better monospaced font out there. In my mission to check, I flicked through all the fonts and grabbed a quick screenshot to compare them.
If you want to play with font, make sure you are in windowed mode and goto EDIT > PREFERENCES > APPEARANCE > FONT > STOPSTATINGTHEOBVIOUS
Compare all 5250 Fonts with the same screen
Spoiler Alert – I ended up with CONSOLAS | Fixed Font NO | Font Scaling YES | AntiAlisasing YES
Why? Because it’s the cleanest looking for my English Old Man Eyes.
You can change the font on the fly, to see what each screen will look like. Most are pretty easy on the eye, apart from the really stupid ones. So here is every font, previewd in the same IBM i Main Menu screen:
IBM3270
Monospaced
Bookshelf Symbol7
Consolas
Courier New
HoloLens MDL 2
Khamla
Lucida Console
Lucida Sans Typewriter
Marlett
Ming Liu
MS Gothic
MS Outlook
MS Reference Speciality
NimSun
OCR-A
Pcomm Session
Seqoe MDL2
Simsun
Symbol
Webdings
Wingdings
#MostUselessBlogEver
Have you considered IBM’s newest font project, Plex? https://www.ibm.com/plex/ I’ve switched to that on my screens and like it better.
Hey Joe. We tried to switch to that font in ACS, but many users had issues on PC wakeup. All text shifts to the left. Jumbled. Have you seen anything like that on yours? Any ideas as to why it might do this?
Inconsolata looks good for me with IBM i Access
Thanks, Nick! Should have known you’d have something handy out here, and it would be one of the top Google returns when searching “5250 Emulator font examples.” Saved me lots of time setting up my new laptop today.