Strange, larger text with the same font as the terminal when running cat on a ttf file.

[Mani4D46]

As someone who uses the terminal most of the day and has the memorized most common terminal ANSI escape sequences, I have never seen such a strange thing in the terminal.
I was doing my work like every other day, for some reason I said why don't I change my font from Hack Nerdfont to the Cozette font because it looks nicer and supports some nerdfont characters. I looked on how to install a font that isn't available on the AUR repository on the arch docs, It said I should move the file to ~/.local/share/fonts to install it for my user.
after moving the file, I said why don't I cat the file to see if I moved the right file, THEN IT HAPPENED, I had large text on my terminal AND IT HAD THE SAME FONT AS MY TERMINAL, my terminal font being the hack nerd font.
I said maybe it's from the kitty image protocol I searched and found nothing, maybe it's the old sixel thing I searched and I also found nothing, maybe it's the Iterm protocol and I also FOUND NOTHING...
then I said maybe I should look into a hex editor to see what's going on, but nothing from my terminal matched the bytes on the hex editor, I looked all over the ttf file's bytes but nothing, then I tried the same thing on other terminals namely vscode terminal, kitty and xterm terminal but the text was completely different, COMPLETELY DIFFRENT!!! it was just like the hex editor text.

[Mani4D46]

I also have an screenshot if it might help.

[loops]

Hi Mani4D46,

You can get larger characters, using your font, on a line with an escape sequence:

printf '\e#6Big characters  ##5 #3 #5  !!5% !!#53#3#335'

Although that doesn't really explain what you're seeing with larger characters superimposed over smaller ones.
I wonder if you're hitting a bug with an extremely long line of characters (no newline)?

But you are likely to see weird things whenever you "cat" binary files to the terminal. It's much
better to use a command like "xxd" or "hexdump" to view them in a sane way.

[Mani4D46]

Hi Mani4D46,

You can get larger characters, using your font, on a line with an escape sequence:

printf '\e#6Big characters  ##5 #3 #5  !!5% !!#53#3#335'

Although that doesn't really explain what you're seeing with larger characters superimposed over smaller ones. I wonder if you're hitting a bug with an extremely long line of characters (no newline)?

But you are likely to see weird things whenever you "cat" binary files to the terminal. It's much better to use a command like "xxd" or "hexdump" to view them in a sane way.

thank you for this reply, I had searched everywhere many times before but never found a way to get larger text, not even on the wezterm docs, how did you found out about that?

[Mani4D46]

Hi Mani4D46,

You can get larger characters, using your font, on a line with an escape sequence:

printf '\e#6Big characters  ##5 #3 #5  !!5% !!#53#3#335'

Although that doesn't really explain what you're seeing with larger characters superimposed over smaller ones. I wonder if you're hitting a bug with an extremely long line of characters (no newline)?

But you are likely to see weird things whenever you "cat" binary files to the terminal. It's much better to use a command like "xxd" or "hexdump" to view them in a sane way.

also, when using the number 3 instead of 6 after the #, I was able to make text overlap

[j4james]

@Mani4D46 In case you're still curious to know, these are standard escape sequences originally from the VT100 line of terminals. You can choose between double width lines (DECDWL) or both double width and double height (DECDHL).

Technically WezTerm's implementation is not quite correct, because if you're just doing \e#3, you should only see the top half of the double-height characters (so there shouldn't be any overlap with the line below). Similarly, if you were using \e#4, you should only see the bottom half. But in most real world scenarios those sequences would be used as a pair, with matching text on both lines, so it wouldn't usually be a problem.

[Mani4D46]

Thank you @j4james, I could have never Imagined "large text" or double-Height (and double width) text as it seems to be the actual name be in the original VT100 line of terminals. also looking at the contents page of that website seems to have many interesting escape codes that many of which I previously thought were impossible.