- A forgotten point is that modern pixel fonts all assume pixels have a 1:1 ratio: height the same as width, so an 8x8 character box is perfectly square.
That's NOT true for many of the old computer displays. Most had finer resolution in the horizontal compared to vertical lines, so more pixels across than in the same distance down. 1:1 "square pixels" was an innovation of the Macintosh, and very unusual for the time. So the fonts on this page displayed on other 80's machines would not look "right". And fonts from those machines brought to modern displays also look off.
- Square pixels were certainly not an innovation of the Macintosh. The earliest raster scan workstation I'm aware of is the Alto, released in 1973. It and the ones that came after it like the Star and Dorado all had square pixels. So did the early 1980s engineering workstations like Apollo and Sun, which also came out before Macintosh.
- I think the Amiga is the most well-known example of what OP means. Older home computers which could be connected to TVs generally had resolutions up to 320x200 (or x240 for PAL) and square pixels. The Amiga could double that on both axes to 640x400/480, but because of the interlaced display of typical TVs/TV-based monitors, that would flicker so bad that it made productive working impossible. So the default resolution used by AmigaOS was 640x200/240, and the fonts were optimized for that.
- Even in the PC world, the most common resolution in for CGA, EGA, and VGA remained 320x200 for many years. With square pixels, this would be 16:10, but the usual case was that this resolution was displayed fullscreen on a 4:3 display, so individual pixels would have an aspect ratio of 5:6.
Most DOS-era games took this into account, so e.g. if the artist wanted to draw a circle 20 pixels tall, they'd make it 24 pixels wide. Textmode followed this pattern as well, so when rendered on a modern square-pixel display without aspect correction, will look vertically squashed compared to their original appearance.
- It's not that forgotten, for example int10h font collection (which probably is the biggest bitmap font resource) prominently shows aspect-ratio corrections for the fonts https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/
- Analog Mono and Two Slice are really neat. If you like those, you'll probably also like another of my favorite modern pixel fonts: Departure Mono. https://departuremono.com
- Analog Mono is no pixel font it is just a vector font drawn as if there where a raster
- It feels like the one used in the Papers, Please video game.
- Amazing! Thank you for sharing.
- Beautiful! Thank you!
- Came here to say the same, I actually like Departure so much I use it as my coding and Terminal font. I'll definitely be trying out the fonts in the original post.
- For programming, you can also try out Terminus (there’s also a TTF version): https://files.ax86.net/terminus-ttf/
- Yeah my programming font since many years now is a pixel-perfect (no AA at all) modified version of Terminus. I modified it myself: don't even remember with which software (but I've got notes about the modifications I did and what's required should I want to modify something again).
I remove a pixel from the lowercase 's' (the top-rightmost one), I modified lowercase 'l' a bit (so it looks less like the '1' digit), I replaced a few characters like the at sign '@' with those from a pixel-perfect Apple Monaco font, and I like to have an empty hole in the middle of my pipe symbol (which still cannot be mistaken for a colon).
Plus a few mods I forgot.
I'd argue that a pixel-perfect font is "tied" to a range of pixel-per-inch monitors: a pixel-perfect font that's perfect for a 110 PPI monitor may neither work on a 90 PPI one nor on a 140 PPI+ one.
But yeah I'm a very happy camper. I obviously cannot distribute it as I "stole" a few characters from Monaco as is and just replaced them in my modded Terminus font.
- I like https://viznut.fi/unscii/ - meant for ascii art but still works well in a terminal, and still gets unicode updates
- The 'fantasy' version reminds me of the Sleipnir font for Dwarf Fortress. Neat! http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/File:Andux_sleipnir_8...
- Anyone else still using the 7x13 "misc fixed" font that comes with X11? I just can't switch. Perfectly readable on both 14" 1920×1200 and 35" 3440×1440. Yes it's small but that's kinda the point.
The only issue is that Nerd Font symbols are really hard to read at that size, even if one manages to get them to render (which isn't that hard in alacritty but needs some extra hacks in rxvt-unicode).
- 6x10 here. Even more text. Only readable because each pixel is completely distinct.
- > 7x13 "misc fixed" font that comes with X11
Xorg here too but a modded (pixel-perfect) Terminus font.
- Analog Mono is no pixel font. It is just a vector font using lines on as pixel like raster. I see this a littel bit as false advertising. TTF files can carry pixel fonts quite well but people seem dont know what a real pixel font is.
- Geist looks like unadulterated garbage, a sloppy rendition of a vector font onto a pixel grid, lack of character and care to banding and shape...
- as a lover of low resolution software, we must acknowledge the goat, never surpassed since 2003: https://www.dafont.com/04b-03.font
nowadays all the alpha exists in making your software look like a cool fantasy tome: https://skeddles.itch.io/eldring-pro
- Also, dotsies[0]: 5 high 1 wide, no horizontal spacing for kerning, ascii-space is just the all-white "character", letters (text) only and made more for visual density than actual pixel scarcity.
[0]: http://web.archive.org/web/20171103012446/http://dotsies.org...
- scrambled my brain, but very cool
- Only to be rivalled by the long-standing Elisa font (also from Japan, like the 04 font) https://twitter.com/gingerbeardman/status/111533004449746944...
- That's 2 advanced for me ...
- I worked on an embedded project a few years ago using a tiny 128x64 display and wanted to use a pixel font but none of the ones I found made me particularly happy so I made my own. Turns out it is very easy to do. Font Forge is fantastic and very easy to use and once you get going by nailing down a few letters at the size you want you can quickly make something that is cohesive, pleasant, and easy to read. I highly recommend this as an exercise.
As a bonus I added a bunch of open source icons as font glyphs for my project and it was really fun to figure out how small I can make them while still being distinctive.
- What's the experience with Font Forge for creating pixel fonts? I have never used it but I always assumed that a font creation tool made for arbitrary style "vector" fonts is probably unwieldy if all you want is square pixels, to be rendered pixel-perfect, etc.
- It's pretty much MS Paint type experience. You get a grid and color pixels black or white. But you can move up/down grid sizes automatically and then you get to fix it at different grid sizes.
- So, Analog Mono and Geist both have enough pixels per glyph that they don't really read as pixel fonts below sizes of ~20px. Analog kinda aleviates that by being made up of big (overlapping) blocks of 2x2 pixels. Geist just kinda looks like a downscaled vector font (to me) though.
- It looks like a high-DPI X11 font to me. It isn't particularly original or unique.
- I am very fond of Gohu font. I have used it on a recent static blog formatting adventure http://dntbl.ink , converted to woff2. I couldn't be happier with how it renders and gives that VAX feel.
- > Geist Pixel isn’t a novelty font. It’s a system extension.
Okay LLM
- To be fair, that's a direct quote from Vercel themselves introducing Geist Pixel: https://vercel.com/blog/introducing-geist-pixel
- ya because Vercel generated the copy with an LLM
- Some people wrote like that before LLMs polluted the water.
Just like people used em dashes before LLMs.
I used bullet points heavily before LLMs.
- I felt personally attacked when LLMs came out: I'm an avid user of "—", bullets, numbered lists, and the word "delve". It's been a miserable couple of years.
- LLMs write like that because people wrote like that. Enough, unfortunately for my remaining love of humanity, to cause the LLMs to adopt the quirk.
- I know. That’s my point.
People talk about LLM writing style like it’s a unique butterfly and humans don’t write that they. But we do. Which is why LLMs do too.
- Many many years ago I wrote a book for Apress, and the style guide for that instilled in me a lot of practices that now make my writing feel LLM-ish to some readers:
- Use bulleted lists, but always introduce and conclude a list with prose; a list can't immediately follow a heading or end a section.
- Use a mix of long and short sentences; in long sentences with parentheticals, use a mix of commas, parens, semicolons, and em dashes.
- With multiple continuous blocks of prose that aren't naturally broken up by an illustration or heading, start a paragraph with an inline bold statement to help anchor the reader.
- I still use bullets extensively. You can easily tell when a human writes them when they are trees instead of lists.
- I don't think even that is a reliable indicator because I'm currently reviewing an LLM generated bullet tree right now.
- Oh interesting. Before the LLM craze, I only ever saw good bullet trees in legalese and git commit messages. The trainwrecks were far more likely to be the rare attempt by HR in a big email or in the odd Jira epic by a PM.
I wouldn't think LLMs would have much to train on. I still see some bad ones, but I don't feel like the quality ratio or overall quantity has changed. I do see more bullet lists though.
- For sure, but I don't think I'm going to give Vercel benefit of the doubt that they aren't writing their copy with an LLM.
- but what does that even mean?
- I noticed the slop immediately and ejected it from by brain.
- There are also these somewhat classic-looking bitmap terminal fonts large enough for modern displays: https://github.com/B2HDPI/B2HDPI
- Sarah Cadigan-Fried has designed some very cool modern pixel art fonts worth checking! https://www.soft-type.com/
- There's an interesting symmetry between the knitting, perler bead and pixel art crowds.
- Old looms could make patterns and it's considered by many that the way to "encode" those different patterns was actually an early of programming.
- There was a talk at a Linux conference a while back relating knitting to programming and I’ve yet to watch it because the audio on YT wasn’t great but it’s on my list.
I find knitting very soothing, and it also scratches the same itch as programming.
- See also, beach pebbles.
- I made myself a pixel font for composite (well, monochrome) video output on an RP2040:
https://github.com/PhobGCC/PhobGCC-SW/blob/main/PhobGCC/rp20...
(search for 1 to see letterforms)
The letters are 8x15 and verticals are 2 pixels wide to work better on older CRT televisions with less-sophisticated chroma filtering on their composite inputs.
I explicitly tried to avoid locking into 45 degree diagonals...
My only question now is, how do I turn this font into something I can use on a computer? I couldn't figure it out the last time I tried.
- A few different resources with various ways to go about it, one of which may be near what you were hoping for:
FontStruct: https://fontstruct.com/
Calligraphr: https://www.calligraphr.com/en/
Kreative Korp: https://www.kreativekorp.com/software/fonts/index.shtml#rela...
Glyphs: https://glyphsapp.com/learn/pixelfont
PixelForge: https://www.pixel-forge.com/
- I made PixelForge [0] a while ago just for creating pixel fonts and being able to export to TTF. I had it semi-abandoned for a few years, but I'm about to release a new version in the next few days! [1]
- Quite impressive [1]. Did you base it on a specific font, or did you just draw it however you felt like?
- I did it with no reference to other fonts, just to my own tastes. It took a bit of iteration to get letter centering on the lower cases to work well but I think it's in a good place.
You can see an older version ("a" has been revised to better center the letter) in action on a monochrome CRT here: https://github.com/PhobGCC/PhobGCC-doc/blob/main/For_Users/P...
- Unrelated font joke.
- Nice, I've been using ChevyRay fonts for a while (example: https://www.spritefusion.com/), they're great too!
- Perfect DOS VGA 437 by Zeh Fernando is still one of my favourites.
- Could somebody explain the Coral Pixel font? It makes no sense to me, given that the whole point of sub pixels was to look sharp without looking colorful. It only ever looked like that when you took a screenshot and then zoomed in, which seems extremely niche.
- All technology, no matter how undesirable it once felt, eventually becomes nostalgic for somebody.
- > the whole point of sub pixels was to look sharp without looking colorful
That was the point, but it never worked: in practice, at least for me, text was smeary and colorful in that era. I wouldn’t want to use Coral Pixel, but I can imagine someone else being nostalgic for it.
- Same here. The MS-Windows boxes at college had lots of coral reef around the glyph edges
- I don't know if it counts as a 'pixel' font, but https://fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/ has hand-drawn bitmaps for a huge swath of unicode (and hand-hinting for aliased rendering IIRC?)
It's not quite as overtly retro, but it's a great functional font, and a great art object besides (at least that's how I justified the price!_
- I really want to like Pragmata Pro, but for such a price I'd like to see a couple more examples of the font used for programming! The website only has three tiny examples for Haskell, Agda, and APL (!). The tester from MonoLisa should be the benchmark here
- People are using vector formats to imitate bitmap fonts? What is the world coming to?
I say that as someone who recently enabled bitmap fonts in my installation of XWindows, so I could use them in Konsole. It's satisfying to see the crisp verticals, but unfortunately Terminus has too much spacing between the letters for my liking.
- >Andrew Gleeson designed Analog Mono, “fixing the crimes of VCR OSD Mono.” There used to be this classic pixel font that you’d see everywhere in the 1990s on hi-fi equipment: VCRs, TVs, camcorders, etc. One of its challenges was a low baseline which resulted in all the letters with descenders pulled up
"VCR OSD Mono is a free bitmap font created by Riciery Leal, inspired by the on-screen display text of vintage VCRs. It is suitable for retro designs and supports 39 languages"
VCR OSD Mono committed no crimes, but it is a crime to make that accusation. VCR OSD Mono faithfully duplicated VCR ASCII character generation. If you want to "fix" it, what's stopping you from "fixing" it all the way to Helvetica or Times or Typewriter? Give a rationale that justifies your own changes, but don't attack others who have a rationale for theirs.
it's fine you want to make a new font. it's not fine to point fingers at people who did a more faithful job than you.
- Hey .. you do need to know that font people regularly reference each other like this .. its kind of a thing in typography, and its a means of demonstrating inspiration and lineage, more than anything else - calling out ones inspiration, in fact.
If there is any one particular hat who can sell controversy, its the typographer.
>fix it all the way to Helvetica
..
Akzidenz-Grotesk Helvetica || gtfo, nichtwa?
- Honestly I was just trying to figure out how many lines of text I could cram onto a small OLED display, and came to the conclusion that the descenders were an unnecessary waste of space. 2+ pixels of vertical space wasted for 5 glyphs! So my heart goes out to VCR OSD Mono.
- My pixel font of choice is Sans Nouveaux[0] (requires Flash). It's MIT licensed too.
- Also here at DaFont: https://www.dafont.com/px-sans-nouveaux.font
- I want better Topaz. My favourite font.
- It's not exactly a better Topaz, but I made Topaz Unicode to be more Topaz: https://gitlab.com/Screwtapello/topaz-unicode
- I still use it (sometimes 1.x, sometimes 2.x) in terminals and IDEs to this day
- The numbers being rendered as the roman numerals in Two Slice is certainly clever. https://joefatula.com/twoslice.html
- It would be nice to add the license/copyright rules associated with these, which is important if you are using in something like a game.
- Two Slice is shockingly readable.
- got caught up on decoding 'tends'
- > Coral Pixels
The version at Github and Google fonts seems old, the one from the font maker's website is at version 1.01, which includes Kanji characters:
("sango" is coral in Japanese)
- Two Slice is smaller than other tiny pixel fonts I've seen. Maybe the smallest legible font? Depends on your definition of legibility I guess.
- Previous discussion (124 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45236263
- _ .... . ... .... ___ ._. _ . ... _ .._. ___ _. _ .__ ___ .._ ._.. _.. _... . ._ __ ___ ._. ... . _._. ___ _.. . .._. ___ _. _ ._._._
- When I came across your comment it was voted down to the point of being [dead]. I've vouched for it to bring it back; I thought it was very clever!
- Maybe Morse is just "out", right now, in the geek population? I shall send out the signal for us to unite: ... ___ ... ___ ...
Hm. Morse makes adding an ellipsis remarkably challenging!
- IMO Morse code misses the point, because it doesn’t depict letters, it encodes the abstract characters into completely different “glyphs”. In particular, knowing the English letters doesn’t make you understand Morse code the way it makes you able to read Two Slice; you need to know the mapping between letters and Morse code.
You can trivially encode any alphabet into a one-dimensional graphical encoding. But you couldn’t, for example, have a remotely intelligible two-pixel Chinese font in the way Two Slice demonstrates that you can have an English one.
- Perhaps it'll get across if the message is in a bottle.
- The first font on the page mentions raising up descenders (g j p q y) so that pixels don't go below the baseline. You can often find characters with minimal descenders in CJK (Chinese, Japanese, or Korean) fonts. Sometimes a raised-descender version is found among the fullwidth-form letters.
- Side note... the best pixel fonts are the ones a game programmer, on a 48hrs ludum dare run, is inevitably speed drawing, pixel by pixel, in MS Paint :)
- These are awesome! Thanks for sharing, will definitely be using one of these
- I find our human need to embrace nostalgia interesting. That we would design blocky “pixel fonts” in vector formats so that we can scale and resize them is quite ironic.
- if we are doing a survey, there is spleen which was adopted as the default console font for openbsd.
- Very cool! Analog mono has a very “Christmas sweater” vibe.
- Two Slice doesn’t seem readable, is there a Threeslice?
- Another good one: FixederSys by Tom7
- Ironic that the page says
> ... it does have a few small problems, such as not working on modern computers ...
When connecting to this site in firefox says
> An error occurred during a connection to tom7.org. Peer attempted old style (potentially vulnerable) handshake.
- I'm a big fan of Departure Mono, very neat website design as well
- This one and its site are gorgeous.
You might also like https://commitmono.com/
- good
- Kumiko Yoshida should be brought before the war crimes tribunal or something. ClearType eyehurt is something that very much needs to stay in the past.
- loving pixel geist.
- [flagged]
- [dead]
