May 28

4 comments

IBM i ACS 5250 EMULATOR FONT – and other ridiculous mumbo jumbo

By NickLitten

May 28, 2018

IBM i, 5250, ACS, as400, font, mochasoft, terminal

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):

Ibm i acs 5250 emulator font - and other ridiculous mumbo jumbo 1

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

Ibm i acs change font

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.

Nick litten best font for ibm i acs
IBM i ACS with CONSOLAS
Ibm i acs select display font

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

Ibm3270

Monospaced

Monospaced

Bookshelf Symbol7

Bookshelf symbol7

Consolas

Consolas

Courier New

Courier new

HoloLens MDL 2

Hololens mdl 2

Khamla

Khamla

Lucida Console

Lucida console

Lucida Sans Typewriter

Lucida sans typewriter

Marlett

Marlett

Ming Liu

Ming liu

MS Gothic

Ms gothic

MS Outlook

Ms outlook

MS Reference Speciality

Ms reference speciality

NimSun

Nimsun

OCR-A

Ocr-a

Pcomm Session

Pcomm session

Seqoe MDL2

Seqoe mdl2

Simsun

Simsun

Symbol

Symbol

Webdings

Webdings

Wingdings

Wingdings

#MostUselessBlogEver

    • 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?

  • 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.

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